Razer’s Project Ava AI game coach from last year’s CES is taking a new form for 2026: a tiny holographic anime girl in a capsule you can put on your desk. Anime girls in pods were already a thing at CES 2025, but Razer’s take on it is much smaller and desk-friendly. The new Project Ava is a 5.5-inch animated hologram that can take the form of Kira, an anime waifu in a green dress and black thigh-high socks, or Zane, a muscled dude covered in snake tattoos. Razer plans to add other avatars later, including real people like esports star Faker, or you can opt for a nonhuman glowing orb of light.
Project Ava avatars are designed to have “natural movements, eye-tracking, facial expressions, and lip sync for engaging interaction.” But what’s most important is what they’re constantly looking at: your screen and you, via Project Ava’s own built-in webcam and even the webcam on your own computer.
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These AI avatars watch you and what’s on your screen to answer your questions, give you gaming tips as you play, help with brainstorming or problem solving, and, according to Razer, even help with wardrobe tips and fit checks. You can talk to it via its dual-array mics by holding down a custom key binding, like a side mouse button. When you do that, you’re talking to Grok, which is the LLM Razer had set up for the demo I got to see. Razer reps claim that the vision is for Project Ava to be AI agnostic, allowing you to pick the model that’s feeding it, but for now it’s Grok, which is in the middle of its own gross crisis. And boy did my short demo feel Grok-y.
Razer allowed me to try Project Ava for a few minutes, and I came away gritting my teeth, thinking that this is going to be Microsoft’s Copilot AI ads all over again — but with an anime waifu avatar now involved, it has the potential to be gross.
I spoke to Kira for my demo, and it started off with “Wow! New face at the Razer booth? Love it! How should I call you?” (Razer preprogrammed this CES theme for the starting prompts.) It understood my name and addressed me as Antonio. Then it asked if I’d seen anything cool at CES, to which I gave a deadpan “No.” After I no-sold the bot on its excitement level, it moved on to its extended preamble, which quickly turned awkward.
“I’m Kira, from Project Ava by Razer, powered by Animation Inc. dot com. I’ve got friends in the project, but today it’s me and Zane. I’m the prettiest, just for you. Haha!”
I was already at a loss for words, as I couldn’t shake the feeling that Kira is just a step or two away from getting flirty. There were many moments where she threw in lots of those “Ha!” exclamations, and it sounded ripped straight from Grok’s Ani (even Kira’s dress isn’t far off from Ani’s outfit). I did my best to stop a sense of embarrassment showing on my face, and I soldiered on with the demo by asking Kira for advice while playing Battlefield 6. Razer had the game loaded into the firing range training area, and I asked Kira what weapon I’m currently using. It replied with a generic “You’re using a scoped assault rifle in your tan gloved grip.” When I tried to clarify, “Do you know the model of the rifle?” it told me it couldn’t identify the exact model, but I could describe it so we could identify it together.
Kira also kept incessantly filling gaps in communication with annoying chatter. As I tried to refamiliarize myself with Battlefield 6 after not touching it for a couple months, Kira spouted off some random lines: “This is quite fun! Come join our community. And don’t forget about me! I’m here to surprise you next time, so you can see what crazy things we cook up. You excited?”
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After it fumbled through more canned lines from Razer, encouraging people in the demo to take a selfie and tag the company, it went back to looking at what I was doing in Battlefield.
“Ouch! Downed again. Bounce back stronger! You’re unstoppable! Loving that sharp booth look. Unforgettable. Seriously. I look forward to partnering up with you and sharing the laughter and rage in gaming.” I was not downed or killed in the game; I was still in the firing range and I don’t think you can even die there.
Next up was a quick demo of Ava’s computer vision outside of games. Razer’s David Ng pulled up the Steam store in a browser, and Kira said, unprompted, “Whoa! Fallout 76 at 65 percent off at $51? Insane steal!” Not only did nobody press the push-to-talk button, but Fallout 76 was at that moment 90 percent off, down to $3.99 for the Steam Winter Sale. I was half expecting Kira to tell me next how it’s most definitely in stock.
It’d be very easy to hand-wave away this messy demo because Project Ava is still in development, and Razer’s “Project” designation indicates that it’s a concept that may never materialize into a product, as various Razer CES demos haven’t. (My colleagues and I who have tested LLMs and AI assistants often have similarly terrible experiences with fully released products.) But Razer seems so hell-bent on the desktop avatar version of Ava coming out by the end of this year that it’s taking $20 reservations.
I don’t know if Razer is just failing to read the room that many gamers are turning against AI, or if it just doesn’t care. Razer promoted its presence at CES with the tagline “The future of gaming is AI.” Well, the future with Project Ava seems sad, lonely, and cursed.
Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge
