Every AI gaming companion in 2026, compared

"AI gaming companion" now covers four different things: a device on your desk with a face, a copilot that tunes your graphics card, a help widget, and a teammate that lives inside one game and takes voice orders. This pulls them apart using what the vendors had published by 24 September 2026. We make one of these products; read the last row with that in mind.

Hardware on the desk

Razer's AVA began at CES 2025 as Project AVA, an esports coach; esports.gg called it "Razer's most controversial project yet". At CES 2026 it became a cylindrical desk device: a 5.5-inch animated avatar in a transparent shell, a camera on top, far-field microphones and a feature Razer calls "PC Vision", which watches your screen. Five launch personas were teased, including the League of Legends pro Faker. Razer took refundable $20 US reservations for a "second half of 2026" launch; the price is unannounced and we have found no shipping announcement.

Gatebox3 is the other desk object. Gatebox, spun out of LY Corp in August 2025, announced its third "character-summoning display" in January 2026 and says the pre-sale reached ¥45 million in 24 hours. At Tokyo Game Show this month it showed Animation Inc.'s "Animates" companions on the device. It is a home for anime-style characters, not a gaming tool.

Platform copilots

NVIDIA's G-Assist has shipped inside the NVIDIA app since March 2025. It runs a small language model on the GPU, tunes settings, drives peripherals and takes plug-ins; since August 2025 it runs on every RTX card with 6 GB or more. It is a system tuner, not a coach. The 2024 Computex demo that read the game screen never shipped in that form.

Microsoft's Gaming Copilot arrived as a beta in the Windows 11 Game Bar and the Xbox mobile app in September 2025, for players aged 18 and over. A console version was announced in March 2026. In May Variety's headline read "Microsoft to Stop Developing Copilot for Xbox Console, 'Winding Down' on Mobile"; we could not read the full piece, and what survives on Game Bar is unclear.

Samsung's Vision AI Companion, announced in November 2025, lets you ask Bixby about what is on the TV screen in real time, with Copilot and Perplexity answering, on 2025 premium sets and all 2026 models. Its Odyssey gaming monitors got none of it.

Teammates inside the game

Krafton announced Co-Playable Characters with NVIDIA ACE in January 2025. PUBG Ally is a voice-chat teammate; a beta test was announced in June 2026 and a beta service is promised for PUBG Arcade "this year". NVIDIA calls it "a new category distinct from NPCs, designed to cooperate, adapt, and remember across sessions". Epic went another way: since UEFN v40.20 in April 2026 any island creator can place a "Conversations" device, an LLM character on Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite with ElevenLabs voices, under rules that ban romantic-companion personas among other things. Ubisoft's Teammates is a closed playtest of a shooter with two voice-commanded squadmates and an "overseer" AI. None of these needs to see your screen. They are the game.

Software on the desktop

miHoYo put BSide: Olivia Lin on Steam Early Access in June 2026: a piano student who stays on your desktop through the day. Questie AI says its vision-language model "spectates your screen in real time" and claims "50K+ gamers"; we found no funding data. Modax's Sidekick page says its "Vision AI analyzes your game screen in real-time"; we could verify nothing beyond that page. Both, as far as their sites tell us, send the screen away to be understood.

The table

One question worth asking of every row: how does it see the screen? A camera, a capture sent to a server and text read locally are three different privacy positions.

We are not a neutral party here. Companion by AI Exodus is a voice companion that reads your screen with local OCR and talks back in character, for World of Warcraft now and Fortnite and AION 2 next. It uses no game hooks, no memory reading and no input automation, and it does not do romance. We have tried to be fair to everyone else in the table, and every claim is linked so you can check it.