NVIDIA

2025’s AI Assistants Will Have Eyes On Your Screens

Until now, AI assistants have largely waited for you to tell them what you want. In 2025, AI assistants will be peeking at your screens, finding out what you’re up to all by themselves.

A series of AI assistant demos at CES 2025 revealed that on-device AI is getting smarter, able to work out what you’re up to without you having to spell it out in text or screenshots.

Some of the AI leaders have already taken tentative steps in this direction. ChatGPT’s app for Mac or Windows can already work with selected coding apps, letting the AI assistant see what you’re working on without having to copy and paste code snippets into the app. Beta versions of Anthropic’s Claude go a step further, literally taking control of your PC to complete tasks, such as booking airline tickets or crunching through repetitive tasks in spreadsheets.

However, CES revealed that AI assistants are preparing to become the all-seeing eye in 2025.

Nvidia’s Project RTX...Nvidia’s Project RTX makes the Copilot assistant that Microsoft has built into Windows 11 already look like yesterday’s technology. It’s a demonstration of the kind of AI assistant that developers will be able to build using a series of Nvidia microservices for Windows 11 PCs.

Project RTX is a talking, graphical assistant that sits in the bottom corner of the screen. The assistant can see what you’re doing on screen at the time, so if you ask Project RTX how to remove a slide from your PowerPoint deck or format data in a spreadsheet as currency, it should be able to help you.

Nvidia’s demonstration video below shows the user asking how they can replace the jacket of someone (conveniently Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang) in a photo, and the AI assistant automatically recognizes they’re using Photoshop and directs them to the relevant Generative Fill feature to complete the task.

Project RTX not only sees what’s happening on screen, but can see what you’re doing via the webcam too. In the video, the user holds up a coffee cup, which the AI assistant identifies as a Starbucks cup, before directing the user to the nearest branch in their hotel. The privacy slider on your webcam might be needed more than ever in 2025...

The AI assistant can also perform more conventional tasks. For example, the user drags a PDF document over the Project RTX avatar and then asks her a series of questions about the document’s contents, mirroring what Copilot and ChatGPT are already capable of doing, but in a more elegant way.

It’s not clear whether Nvidia plans to release Project RTX as a standalone assistant — although the fact you can sign up for news updates on the project suggests the company’s at least thinking about it.

Razer’s Project AVA...While Nvidia’s assistant is eager to help with the more mundane PC tasks, Razer’s Project AVA is more interested in helping you have fun, specifically with gaming. Today’s games can be tortuously complex, leading many gamers to turn to YouTube videos or walkthrough guides to find out how to beat a boss or find a winning strategy.

AVA will save you having to pause the game by delivering real-time audio advice based on what’s happening on screen as you play.

As you can see from the demo video, AVA covers a variety of gaming genres, ranging from MOBAs such as League of Legends through to first-person shooters such as Call of Duty, meaning the advice has to be delivered near instantaneously to have any positive effect.

In a demo at Razer’s CES suite, I saw this first hand, with AVA delivering tactical advice on when to push or what enemies the player was likely to face as they marauded through a map on League of Legends. At the end of the game, there was even a wrap screen showing what the player did well and how they could improve their performance in future runs.

Alas, I didn’t have the opportunity to play with AVA’s guidance myself, although I doubt any level of AI assistance will ever make me competent at League of Legends. However, the company is letting willing gamers sign up for the Project AVA beta on its website, suggesting this AI assistant stands a very strong chance of making it to a shipping product in the year ahead.

Barry Collins