NVIDIA Collaborates With Top Gaming Developers Including Ubisoft To Bring ACE, Lifelike & Interactable AI NPCs, To Next-Gen Games & Apps

Remember NVIDIA ACE? The game-changing AI NPC creator is now being utilized by various developers for next-gen games & apps.

NVIDIA's ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) is a truly remarkable technology that we have yet to see in action but it looks like we are getting close to that with Team Green's latest announcement. The company has announced today its production microservices for the ACE technology which will allow developers of games, tools, & apps to seamlessly integrate AI models into avatars or NPCs as we like to refer to them for their next-gen gaming and app experiences.

ACE is something that we have touched upon countless times. The technology has been expanded by NVIDIA throughout 2023 with the introduction of NeMo SteerLM which allows devs to play around with customizable attributes for these digital avatars and the most recent collaboration with Inworld AI further expands these NPCs to be contextually aware.

Now kicking things off in 2024, NVIDIA has partnered up with various developers through its ACE microservices to utilize its Audio2Face (A2F) and Riva Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to make these AI-powered NPCs better than ever. Among the list of developers are Ubisoft, Tencent, UneeQ, Ourpalm, NetEase Games, miHoYo, Convai, Charisma AI, and the aforementioned, Inworld.

In a demo shown by NVIDIA, we see how text-to-speech can be utilized and refined by Convai's fine-tuned LLM + RAG models to create very believable interactions with gaming NPCs. Not only does the NPC react with the player himself based on the tone of his speech but further reacts with other NPCs in the same environment based on the text that they have just received from the player.

Once again, if you think of it from a gaming perspective, this could create some truly next-gen experiences unlike anything we have seen before and we would love to see its implementation in an actual AAA game. With ACE microservices, we are one step closer to seeing this become an eventuality.