Razer is getting into AI with a new developer platform called Wyvrn. It encompasses dev-focused automation tools like the Razer AI QA Copilot to assist with quality assurance / game testing and the AI Gamer Copilot (formerly called Project Ava) for real-time tips and guides via voice assistant while playing games.
Wyvrn (pronounced “wyvern,” like the mythical creature) will also be an umbrella for Razer’s next-gen Chroma RGB platform, a new THX Spatial Audio Plus game plug-in, and Razer’s Sensa HD Haptics software.
The most consequential of Razer’s new tools is the AI QA Copilot. It’s a cloud-based plug-in for Unreal Engine, Unity, and bespoke engines in C++ that’s designed to reduce the time and cost of manual quality assurance testing through AI. Quality assurance is a labor-intensive process for any video game, involving many hours of testing and manually logging glitches in need of fixing. The AI assistant can watch a game being tested, automatically find bugs or performance issues like frame rate drops, and create a QA playtest report with both its findings and any bugs manually tagged by the tester.
Razer claims that its AI can identify 20 to 25 percent more bugs compared to manual testing, and this can reduce QA time by up to 50 percent as well as cost savings of up to 40 percent. After playtest reports are generated, the AI QA Copilot is designed to learn from the tagged bugs to get “smarter” and more effective.
What will happen to the employee headcount in QA teams if these tools are introduced and proven successful? It’s perhaps not difficult to imagine. And Razer is already partnering with game dev services company Side (formerly PTW) to integrate the AI QA Copilot into its in-house QA teams.
The other big component of Razer’s dabbling in AI is its upcoming and very uniquely named AI Gamer Copilot. It’s an AI-based voice assistant that’s designed to watch you play and give you live, on-the-fly tips for tactics in competitive multiplayer games like MOBAs or strategies on how to take down difficult enemies in single-player games like Black Myth: Wukong. My colleague Sean Hollister and I saw a brief demo of this at CES while it was called Project Ava, and it seemed… interesting. The retiring of its “project” moniker means it’s destined for an actual release.
Razer’s other, non-AI announcements pegged under the Wyvrn platform include its Razer Sensa HD Haptics, which is now getting a sim racing game integration in partnership with SimHub. That means users of its Freyja haptic chair cushion and Kraken V4 Pro headset can get multidirectional, multidevice haptic feedback in games like Assetto Corsa Evo. Razer claims Sensa haptics are now in over 100 supported titles, with the promise of more to come. And lastly, Razer is introducing a THX Spatial Audio Plus plug-in for Wwise. It’s an open-source format alternative to Dolby and DTS, offering more immersive 3D audio in games.
