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We chat with Justin Chen, product marketing manager at Razer about the company's new holographic companion you can keep at your desk.
"Hello everyone, I'm Alex here. I'm at CES. We're checking out Project Ava with Razer. I'm here with Justin We've got Kira who you can maybe see but she's quite small. She's keeping herself quiet at the minute But she is the new desk AI companion that people can use for gaming and for other stuff as well Could you talk me through a bit about what makes Project Ava really exciting right now?
Yeah, so with Project Ava, we did introduce it last year as sort of your on desktop gaming sort of co-pilot But we really evolved that concept now here with the holographic design and bringing them that level of personalization And an interaction that you can have with something like an AI assistant on your desk like this. So we've got Kira here We've got a number of other avatars as well But basically we wanted to make You know a personalized AI experience for you to use for your daily life and if we're gaming as well And what are some of the use cases for this we saw in the demo sort of things like picking out jackets and stuff like that and Does it work primarily off the camera feeds does it work primarily off what you say to it?
Yeah So because it uses you know These AI models it'll learn over time kind of like your habits and your preferences and things like that But it has the camera. Of course. It has microphone and the speakers So you're able to interact with it mostly through audio when you're trying to you know Ask it for advice or give it you know instructions to schedule things out for you a set timers and things like that But because it's also connected to your PC It has PC vision essentially so I could see what's on your desktop You can use that for games But things also like looking at an email and reviewing the email reviewing a news article or something and breaking down those key points for You so that you can kind of have the cliff notes or the short-form version to help improve that productivity and your daily workflow It's a key term that I learned from your project page when I was talking about project Motoko. This is also a LLM agnostic I believe correct. Yeah, so for the purposes of the demo here at CES We do have grok running on the back end, but for the final version, you know when we're launching later in the year We are gonna give users the option to choose the LLM of their choice They'll be able to drop, you know pick it from a drop-down or something like that So you can switch between grok or you know chat GP or etc, whichever you prefer. And so this brings this sort of like New version I guess a project Ava is a lot more customizable not only in the sense of LLMs But as we see there's Kira here, but there's also other characters that you can pick from as well Is there gonna go further than that? Yeah, so we have Zane we have our own sort of like razor characters Zane Kira We've worked with Faker the you know, the League of Legends player. We've worked with Sal the Japanese influencer And but we also want to give folks the option to create their own custom avatars I think you upload in as well as we're looking into, you know, third-party partnerships to bring licensed characters So you have you know characters that you're familiar with inside of our little hologram here I noticed during the demo as well that there was an option There's the screen viewing option and there's the camera option Does it switch between those two is it always sort of watching both at the same time to collect this information that it needs?
Yeah, so typically at least for the demo persons, you know, we got a couple of different options here But you'll be able to choose between either the screen capture a quick camera capture or screen and camera capture So kind of up to you in that same vein We also have will have on the final version a privacy screen on the camera so that you know People will have that, you know peace of mind to be able to separate, you know If they so chose that it's not constantly looking and constantly looking at their you know, their room or reviewing, you know Whatever is in front of it Little show here so Kira can stop looking at me for five seconds and give me a bit of peace of mind In that same vein then I can see that there's a USB type-c connection to this what part of it runs locally and what part of it is running via Connection. Yeah, so the USBC, you know helps power everything You do need a Windows PC with internet connection as the animations for the characters will be run locally But all of the processing the information storing and things like that will be having on the back end With whatever LLM that you guys are choosing. Yeah, and so that with the running locally, is that gonna?
Sap any performance from someone's PC or anything like that or is it all gonna be within its own little domain on the corner?
So basically, I think Though the model basically is about 50 megabytes large So it really shouldn't take too much of the processing power away from you know The PC that you have unless you're running something, you know, very low-end or something like that, you know So it should be you know should not impact the performance of the PC. Yeah Do you have sort of a release window for this? I believe it's open for Pre-registration right now. Do you have any more information about people when people might be able to get this on their desks?
So we are targeting by the end of 2026 Yeah, and the reservations are open. We open them on Tuesday for about $20 USD But yeah, so targeting the end of 2026 and that's when it was we get closer We also have the you know, the final pricing to share as well And this push with sort of does this work maybe alongside?
Motoko in any ways as this is one of a couple of things that I've seen a razor using that AI companionship aspect Is there any synergy between those two I guess so at the moment there isn't there's always some room for this type of thing You know with our ecosystem things like chroma stuff like that We do like to integrate our products and things like together. So definitely a possibility But at the moment, there's no connection between like a Motoko or Ava. Yeah, perfect Justin. Thank you so much for your time Thank you. Kira anything to add She's quiet today. She's quiet today. I can respect that. I can respect that you get nervous on camera You"
