NVIDIA ACE for Games Sparks Life Into Virtual Characters With Generative AI

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Custom Model Foundry Produces AI Models That Run in Cloud and PC

Kairos demo of NVIDIA ACE for Games

The NVIDIA Kairos demo used NVIDIA ACE for Games to create Jin, an immersive non-playable character, inside a ramen shop.
The NVIDIA Kairos demo used NVIDIA ACE for Games to create Jin, an immersive non-playable character, inside a ramen shop.

TAIPEI, Taiwan, May 28, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- —COMPUTEX—NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games, a custom AI model foundry service that transforms games by bringing intelligence to non-playable characters (NPCs) through AI-powered natural language interactions.

Developers of middleware, tools and games can use ACE for Games to build and deploy customized speech, conversation and animation AI models in their software and games.

“Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize the interactivity players can have with game characters and dramatically increase immersion in games,” said John Spitzer, vice president of developer and performance technology at NVIDIA. “Building on our expertise in AI and decades of experience working with game developers, NVIDIA is spearheading the use of generative AI in games.”

Pioneering Generative AI in Games
Building on NVIDIA Omniverse™, ACE for Games delivers optimized AI foundation models for speech, conversation and character animation, including:

  • NVIDIA NeMo™ — for building, customizing and deploying language models, using proprietary data. The large language models can be customized with lore and character backstories, and protected against counterproductive or unsafe conversations via NeMo Guardrails.

  • NVIDIA Riva — for automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech to enable live speech conversation.

  • NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face™ — for instantly creating expressive facial animation of a game character to match any speech track. Audio2Face features Omniverse connectors for Unreal Engine 5, so developers can add facial animation directly to MetaHuman characters.

Developers can integrate the entire NVIDIA ACE for Games solution or use only the components they need.

‘Kairos’ Offers a Peek at the Future of Games
NVIDIA collaborated with Convai, an NVIDIA Inception startup, to showcase how developers will soon be able to use NVIDIA ACE for Games to build NPCs. Convai, which is focused on developing cutting-edge conversational AI for virtual game worlds, integrated ACE modules into its end-to-end real-time avatar platform.

In a demo, called Kairos, players interact with Jin, the purveyor of a ramen shop. Although he is an NPC, Jin replies to natural language queries realistically and consistent with the narrative backstory — all with the help of generative AI. Watch the demo, which is rendered in Unreal Engine 5 using the latest ray-tracing features and NVIDIA DLSS.