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Sony to Expand Chinese Game Incubator in Microsoft Head-to-Head 

Visitors walk past a logo of Sony at Sony Building in Tokyo, July 31, 2014. (AP)
Visitors walk past a logo of Sony at Sony Building in Tokyo, July 31, 2014. (AP)
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Sony to Expand Chinese Game Incubator in Microsoft Head-to-Head 

Visitors walk past a logo of Sony at Sony Building in Tokyo, July 31, 2014. (AP)
Visitors walk past a logo of Sony at Sony Building in Tokyo, July 31, 2014. (AP)

Sony Group Corp said on Tuesday it plans to expand a program to identify and incubate Chinese-made games, in a race with Microsoft Corp to tap China's gaming market. 

The program will invest more than 1 million yuan ($140,080) in each game it enrolls, and will not only fund small teams but also big teams with dozens of engineers or more, Bao Bo, Sony's director of China game production, said. 

The Japanese tech giant's plans were made public during an event live-streamed from the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu to re-launch the China Hero Project program, which ground to a halt due to COVID-19. 

"The scale of the third season will far exceed the previous two," Bao said, adding that Sony will publish some games and its PlayStation Studios will support enrolled projects. 

Sony said that it will be the publisher of Lost Soul Aside and Convallaria, two games enrolled in the previous two seasons. 

The China Hero Project unveiled its first two batches of games in 2017 and 2019 and has supported 17 titles, of which seven have reached the market. 

It was part of Sony's years-long approach to China, which ultimately led it to a lucrative exclusivity deal with the Chinese hit game "Genshin Impact" outside of the China Hero Project. Little known before its 2019 launch, it became of the world's most profitable games. 

Reuters reported last month that Sony's success with "Genshin Impact" has driven Microsoft to aggressively woo Chinese game developers with big licensing deals. 

Sony sells the PlayStation (PS) consoles in China, where people have traditionally preferred playing mobile-based games. 

It has sold more than 3.5 million PS4 consoles in China and Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony's gaming-focused subsidiary Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), said it had sold about 670,000 units of PS5 there since its Chinese launch in May 2021. Tatsuo Eguchi, president of SIE Shanghai, said that Sony's goal is to sell twice as many PS5 consoles as it had for the PS4 and believed the China Hero Project could help meet this goal. 

"We want gamers around the world to better understand the creativity that comes from China. I have always had a dream which is for console gaming to become a regular part of daily entertainment for Chinese people," he said. 

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Technology

Microsoft Revamps AI Copilot with New Voice, Reasoning Capabilities

Copilot logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
Copilot logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
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Microsoft Revamps AI Copilot with New Voice, Reasoning Capabilities

Copilot logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
Copilot logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)

Microsoft has given its consumer Copilot, an artificial intelligence assistant, a more amiable voice in its latest update, with the chatbot also capable of analyzing web pages for interested users as they browse.

The US software maker now has "an entire army" of creative directors - among them psychologists, novelists and comedians - finessing the tone and style of Copilot to distinguish it, Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft AI, told Reuters in an interview.

In one demonstration of the updated Copilot, a consumer asked what housewarming gift to buy at a grocery store for a friend who did not drink wine. After some back-and-forth, Copilot said aloud: "Italian (olive) oils are the hot stuff right now. Tuscan's my go-to. Super peppery."

The feature rollout, starting Tuesday, is one of the first that Suleyman has overseen since Microsoft created his division in March to focus on consumer products and technology research.

Long identified with business software, Microsoft has had a much harder road in the consumer realm. Its Bing search engine, for instance, is still dwarfed by Google.

Suleyman is hoping for a bigger splash with Copilot, which launched last year in a crowded field of AI chatbots, including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

Copilot's newly fashioned voice capabilities make it seem much more of an active listener, giving verbal cues like "cool" and "huh," Suleyman said.

Underlying the product are Microsoft AI, or "MAI," models, plus a technology suite from partner OpenAI, Suleyman said.

Suleyman added that consumers who spend $20 monthly for Copilot Pro can start testing a "Think Deeper" feature that reasons through choices, like whether to move to one city or another.

He said an additional test feature for paying subscribers, Copilot Vision, amounts to "digital pointing" - the ability for users to talk to AI about what they see in a Microsoft Edge browser. Consumers have to opt in, and the content they view will not be saved or used to train AI, Microsoft said.

These updates represent "glimmers" of AI that can be an "ever-present confidant, in your corner," Suleyman said. It's a vision he articulated as CEO of Inflection AI, whose top talent Microsoft poached in a closely watched deal this year.

Suleyman said that eventually, Copilot will learn context from consumers' Word documents, Windows desktops, even their gaming consoles if they grant permission.

Asked what Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder, thinks of the company's AI efforts, Suleyman said Gates was excited.

"He's always asking me about when Copilot can read and parse his emails. It's one of his favorite ones," Suleyman said. "We're on the case."