The quieter of the two gamescom announcements may end up being the more interesting one. Pawprint Studio confirmed that a post-launch update powered by NVIDIA ACE will let Pathfinders interact with their Aniimo directly through voice and natural language, instead of through menus.
The described feature set is specific. You will be able to talk to your Aniimo, teach them new skills, and send them out to gather resources using voice input, and each creature will respond with dynamic emotions based on what you do. In other words, interactions the game currently routes through a companion menu become spoken requests, and the creature reacts as a character rather than as a UI element.
The technical detail matters for anyone wondering where their voice goes. Per NVIDIA’s own gamescom 2026 write-up, the system runs on a fine-tuned Nemotron Small Language Model hosted locally on the player’s GPU, interpreting player intent and triggering the game’s existing behaviour APIs. That is on-device inference driving real in-game actions, not a cloud chatbot bolted onto a pet.
NVIDIA puts a window on it that the Aniimo announcement does not: early 2027. That comes from NVIDIA’s own gamescom write-up, so it is the timing to plan around, and it places voice interaction at least a full quarter after the September launch. Two things are still explicitly not announced, and we will not fill them in: there is no published hardware requirement, so which GPUs qualify is unknown, and there is no statement about non-NVIDIA hardware, consoles or mobile, which is the obvious question given the platform list. Treat the feature as announced for 2027, not as something you will find on September 16.
What this means for players (editor’s note): this is the first mechanic Aniimo has announced that no rival creature-collector offers, and it lands on the exact fantasy the game has been selling since its reveal, which is a bond with a creature rather than a slot in a party. Being local-first is the right call and sidesteps the latency and privacy problems that sank earlier AI-NPC demos. Temper expectations anyway, because voice systems live or die on how gracefully they handle being misheard, and nothing has been shown running in public yet. If you want to know what the game actually ships with on day one, the what to expect guide keeps the confirmed launch feature list separate from the announced-later pile, and our Twining explainer covers the bonding system this would sit on top of. Aniimo’s earlier DLSS 4.5 integration is the other half of its NVIDIA work.
Source: Official Aniimo announcement: A New Way to Connect with Your Aniimo
