LogInThe tech gives avatars facial animations, speech recognition, and translation abilities.
The ability to freely talk to NPCs in games is getting more and more realistic. At CES 2024, NVIDIA presented production microservices for the NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) that allow developers to integrate generative AI models into digital avatars. In particular, they make avatars more alive with NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face (A2F), which creates facial animations from audio sources, and NVIDIA Riva automatic speech recognition (ASR) for making customizable multilingual speech and translation applications.
“Generative AI technologies are transforming virtually everything we do, and that also includes game creation and gameplay,” said Keita Iida, vice president of developer relations at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA ACE opens up new possibilities for game developers by populating their worlds with lifelike digital characters while removing the need for pre-scripted dialogue, delivering greater in-game immersion.”
According to the company, these technologies can transform interactions between players and NPCs, making characters listen to you in any language and react to what you're saying not only with words but also with expressions on their faces. The best thing about ACE is the speed at which NPCs reply to you, this is a nice step forward. NVIDIA worked with Convai, a company that creates conversational AI for virtual worlds, "to expand the NVIDIA Kairos demo with a number of new features and inclusion of ACE microservices."
"Convai’s new framework allows NPCs to converse among themselves and gives them awareness of objects, enabling them to pick up and deliver items to desired areas. Furthermore, NPCs gain the ability to lead players to objectives and traverse worlds."
Among the developers using ACE are Charisma.AI, Convai, Inworld, miHoYo, NetEase Games, Ourpalm, Tencent, Ubisoft, and UneeQ.
Hopefully, we'll see reactive NPCs in every game one day, and this tech is definitely pushing this bright future closer to us.
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