NVIDIA Launches ACE for Games with Generative AI

NVIDIA has launched NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games, a custom artificial intelligence model foundry service for videogames that brings 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, in a statement. "Building on our expertise in AI and decades of experience working with game developers, NVIDIA is spearheading the use of generative AI in games."

Building on NVIDIA Omniverse, ACE for Games delivers AI foundation models for speech, conversation, and character animation, including the following:

• 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 creating expressive facial animation of a game character to match any speech track.

Convai, a developer of conversational AI for virtual game worlds, integrated ACE modules into its 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.

"With NVIDIA ACE for Games, Convai';s tools can achieve the latency and quality needed to make AI non-playable characters available to nearly every developer in a cost-efficient way," said Purnendu Mukherjee, founder and CEO of Convai, in a statement.

Other game developers and startups are already using NVIDIA generative AI technologies for their workflows. These include the following

• GSC Game World is adopting Audio2Face in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl.
• Fallen Leaf is using Audio2Face for character facial animation in Fort Solis, a sci-fi thriller that takes place on Mars.
• Charisma.ai, a company enabling virtual characters through AI, is leveraging Audio2Face to power the animation in its conversation engine.