NVIDIA ACE brings virtual characters to life with generative AI
The brilliance of Artificial Intelligence continues and Nvidia does not want to be left behind and it is that recently it has just shown its new platform "Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE)" and the capabilities of this platform impressed many, since it drew special attention because it allows players to speak naturally with non-playable characters (NPCs). ) and receive the appropriate answers.
With this news, the future of video games could take another direction, especially in open world titles, which could create a new experience and, above all, increase the expectations of virtual worlds.
Nvidia I present «Avatar Cloud Engine» during Computex 2023, with a demo called Kairos featuring a (human) player talking to an NPC named Jin in a dystopian looking ramen shop. At the event, Nvidia presented the demo as a preview of what could be the collision between video games and AI.
Since the recent LLM breakthrough, attempts have been made to use such AI systems in video games to enable dynamic dialogue with non-player characters (NPCs) and Nvidia has just unveiled a successful attempt at a project to create a dialogue with an NPC.
At the Computex 2023 event, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, presented:
"Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Gaming". It is an AI model casting service, designed to bring game characters to life through natural language conversations, audio-facial expression, and text-to-speech/speech-to-text capabilities.
In the demo, the player (named Kai) walks into Jin's ramen shop, asks how he's doing (voiceover), and comments that the neighborhood has a high crime rate. Kai asks if he can help him and Jin replies:
"If you want to do something, I've heard rumors that the powerful crime lord Kumon Aoki is causing all kinds of chaos in the city."
Jin added that he thinks Aoki is probably behind the violence. Kai asks where to find Aoki and Jin tells him, which puts the user on the path to search.
“AI will not only contribute to the redefinition and synthesis of the environment, but also to the animation of the characters. AI will play a very important role in the future of video games,” said the Nvidia CEO.
the demonstration was made by Nvidia and its partner Convai to promote the tools used to create it.
"With Nvidia ACE for Games, Convai's toolset can achieve the latency and quality needed to make non-playable AI characters cost-effectively accessible to almost any developer," said Purnendu Mukherjee, Founder and CEO of Convai.
Of course, the demo doesn't just use these tools. This built on Unreal Engine 5, el video game engine developed by Epic Game, with tons of ray tracing. According to Nvidia, the AI models that make up ACE vary in size, performance, and quality.
Huang was very optimistic about Nvidia's latest developments in AI, especially generative AI and with this demo, mentions that it is a preview of what could be the collision between games and AI.
Nvidia ACE consists of three distinct elements: NeMo, Riva, and Omniverse Audio2Face:
- Nemo provides excellent language models that developers can customize with story and dialogue data.
- Riva it can recognize speech and convert text to audio, allowing for live conversations with NeMo. Audio2Face converts Riva's audio output into facial animations that can be used, for example, to control MetaHuman characters in Unreal Engine 5 via Omniverse Links.
Finally, it's worth mentioning that in addition to ACE for Games, Nvidia announced a number of other collaborations and products, including the DGX GH200 AI supercomputer, which features 256 Grace Hopper chips with a total of 144 terabytes of memory and delivers high-end AI performance. scale. According to Nvidia, the DGX GH200 GPT-3 is 2,2 times faster than a DGX H100 cluster.
Finally, if you are interested in being able to know more about it, you can consult the details in the following link.