miHoYo AI Lead Reveals Talking NPCs and Game-Making Agents, Honkai Takes the Lead?

At the 2026 Yunqi Conference's Alibaba Cloud AI Gaming Forum, Zheng Yinhe, head of miHoYo's Honkai series AI NPC & Gameplay tech team, shared the company's AI practices in gameplay, development, and AI research. The "AI Pom-Pom" launched in Honkai: Star Rail version 4.2 supported story Q&A, guide queries, long-term memory, and emotional feedback, and kept up with the game's 42-day major version updates, though it is now offline. miHoYo also built its own Agent platform EchoX and teased a new tabletop gameplay where AI characters compete autonomously.