Why we read the screen instead of hooking the game

A companion that talks about your game has to know what is happening in it. The voice, the character and the jokes all sit on top of that one problem, and there are three ways to solve it. The choice decides whether the thing is allowed to exist.

Three ways to know

Read the game's memory, or inject code into the client. This is how cheats work, and how a good many "helpers" work too: a library loaded inside the process, a pointer to the health value. It is precise and fast. It is also what every anti-cheat is built to catch, and a well-meaning coach that reaches into the same memory as a wallhack looks like one.

Use an official API. Some games publish one. Riot has a developer programme; Blizzard has an add-on system that runs inside a sandbox the game controls. APIs are the clean route, but they expose only what the publisher chooses, they can be narrowed at any time, and many games have none.

Look at the pixels. A screenshot is what a friend on the sofa sees. Run OCR on it and you get the quest text, the chat line, the boss name, the number in the corner: nothing the player cannot see, and nothing the game did not intend to show.

We took the third route. It is the slowest and least precise, and the only one we could defend in front of a publisher.

What the rules say, in their words

Riot's Vanguard FAQ, dated 1 April 2024: "Overlays and internal tools using the API, game client, and in-game APIs should continue to function". Riot Support, on third-party applications: "No software should compromise game integrity or negatively impact the in-game player experience".

Blizzard, in a forum post of 5 August 2025: "The use of third-party software that modifies the World of Warcraft game client is against our Terms of Service". In December 2025 Dot Esports reported that third-party raid helpers, overlays that read combat data, were being banned, and noted: "Overlays are different from add-ons… some will be in a gray area".

Put together, the map looks like this. Modifying the client is out. Reading the game's data from outside is grey at best and getting greyer. An overlay that only looks and talks is the least exposed position on that map. Not immune: nobody outside Blizzard or Riot can promise that. But it reads what the player is already looking at rather than what the game is hiding, and we send no input, so there is no automation to argue about.

Razer puts its own version on the Project AVA concept page: "Razer works to ensure all features comply with game developers' terms of service, focusing on helping players learn and master new mechanics rather than providing an unfair competitive advantage." We would sign that sentence. What it does not say is how AVA's "PC Vision" gets its picture; the camera on top of the device suggests one answer and the feature name another.

The privacy cost of cloud screen-sharing

Choosing pixels moves the question from anti-cheat to privacy: somebody has to look at the picture. Questie AI says its vision-language model "spectates your screen in real time". Modax's Sidekick page says its "Vision AI analyzes your game screen in real-time"; we could verify nothing about it beyond that page. Samsung's Vision AI Companion hands what is on the TV to Copilot and Perplexity for answering. A screen understood in a data centre is a screen that has left your house, and a game screen is rarely just the game: Discord sits behind it, the browser tab, the email you forgot to close.

Our OCR runs on your own PC. What the character works from is text the OCR produced, not a video of your desktop. The cost is real: OCR cannot read what is not drawn, so there is no enemy behind the wall, no hidden cooldown, no memory value, and now and then it misreads a font. We think the limit is the feature. A companion that knows only what you know is one you never have to hide.

Saying it is a machine

The other set of rules is about disclosure. Since 2 August 2026 Article 50 of the EU AI Act applies to chatbots and virtual assistants, and the Digital Omnibus did not delay it: the user must be made aware they are talking to an AI "unless obvious from context". The high-risk obligations were postponed to 2 December 2027, and systems already on the market have until 2 December 2026 to mark synthetic content. Fines run to €15 million or 3% of turnover.

In California, SB 243 has been in force since 1 January 2026, with AI disclosure, break reminders and protections for known minors, crisis protocols and a private right of action. In the UK, Ofcom published an explainer on AI chatbots under the Online Safety Act in December 2025, opened its first investigation into an AI companion service, Novi Ltd, over age assurance in January 2026, and announced mystery-shopping research in June.

A voice that plays a character is exactly the system these rules describe. It is also why our personas are playful rather than romantic, the line Epic drew when it banned romantic-companion personas from its Fortnite Conversations device.

We make Companion by AI Exodus, 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; no game hooks, no memory reading, no input automation, no romance. This is our reasoning, not a neutral survey, and every quotation above is linked so you can read it in full.