NVIDIA Revolutionizes Gaming Experience with AI-Powered Non-Playable Characters

• NVIDIA has introduced the Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games, a custom AI model foundry service aimed at enhancing the intelligence and interactivity of non-playable characters (NPCs) in games through AI-powered natural language interactions.
• The ACE for Games offers foundational AI models for speech, conversation, and character animation, integrated into Convai’s avatar platform to create realistic NPC interactions as demonstrated in the ‘Kairos’ demo, and can be deployed locally or on the cloud.

TAIPEI, Taiwan, May 28, 2023 — NVIDIA Corporation, the global tech giant, today unveiled the NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games at COMPUTEX. ACE is an innovative AI model foundry service that breathes life into non-playable characters (NPCs) in video games through AI-fueled natural language interactions.

NVIDIA ACE for Games provides developers of middleware, tools, and games with the capacity to craft and implement bespoke speech, conversation, and animation AI models into their software and games. John Spitzer, Vice President of Developer and Performance Technology at NVIDIA, expressed his belief that generative AI holds immense potential to revolutionize player interaction with game characters and significantly enhance game immersion.

The ACE for Games service builds upon the NVIDIA Omniverse™, offering optimized AI foundational models for speech, conversation, and character animation. This suite of tools includes NVIDIA NeMo™ for language model creation, NVIDIA Riva for live speech conversation, and NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face™ to create expressive facial animation of a game character corresponding to any speech track.

To showcase the capabilities of NVIDIA ACE for Games, NVIDIA partnered with Convai, an NVIDIA Inception startup, to create a demonstration called Kairos. In this demo, players converse with Jin, an NPC and owner of a ramen shop. Through the power of generative AI, Jin responds to natural language inquiries realistically and in alignment with the narrative backstory.

Purnendu Mukherjee, founder and CEO at Convai, applauded NVIDIA ACE for Games, stating that Convai’s tools could leverage it to achieve the latency and quality required to make AI non-playable characters accessible to almost every developer cost-effectively.

NVIDIA also announced the models are designed for low latency, a crucial requirement for immersive and responsive interactions in games. Developers can deploy these models via NVIDIA DGX™ Cloud, GeForce RTX™ PCs or on their local servers for real-time inferencing. The ACE for Games foundry service assists developers in fine-tuning models for their games.

Several game developers and startups, including GSC Game World and Fallen Leaf, have already incorporated NVIDIA’s generative AI technologies into their workflows. As such, the NVIDIA ACE for Games promises to be a game-changer, transforming the gaming experience and catapulting it into a new era of AI-powered interactivity.