NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA), a global leader in graphics processing units (GPUs) and artificial intelligence (AI), has unveiled its latest innovation, the NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games. This groundbreaking service is designed to infuse non-playable characters (NPCs) in games with AI-powered natural language interactions, thereby enhancing the gaming experience.
ACE for Games allows developers to create and implement custom AI models for speech, conversation, and animation in their games. The service is built on NVIDIA’s Omniverse, a platform that provides optimized AI foundation models for these functions.
John Spitzer, NVIDIA’s vice president of developer and performance technology, believes that generative AI has the potential to revolutionize player interaction with game characters and significantly boost immersion in games. He further emphasized that NVIDIA, with its extensive expertise in AI and long-standing collaboration with game developers, is leading the charge in the application of generative AI in games.
The ACE for Games suite includes NVIDIA NeMo, a tool for building, customizing, and deploying language models; NVIDIA Riva, which enables live speech conversation through automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech; and NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face, a feature that instantly creates expressive facial animation of a game character to match any speech track.
Developers have the flexibility to integrate the entire ACE for Games solution or only the components they need. NVIDIA has also partnered with Convai, an NVIDIA Inception startup, to demonstrate how developers can use ACE for Games to build NPCs. In a demo called Kairos, players interact with Jin, an NPC who responds to natural language queries realistically and in line with the narrative backstory, all thanks to generative AI.
The neural networks powering ACE for Games are optimized for different capabilities, with various size, performance, and quality trade-offs. The service can be deployed via NVIDIA DGX Cloud, GeForce RTX PCs, or on-premises for real-time inferencing. The models are optimized for latency, a critical requirement for immersive, responsive interactions in games.
Several game developers and startups are already leveraging NVIDIA’s generative AI technologies. GSC Game World, Fallen Leaf, and Charisma.ai are among the companies using these technologies in their workflows. This development marks a significant step forward in the gaming industry, promising to transform the gaming experience with AI-powered NPCs.
