Artificial intelligence continues to make great strides and big hardware manufacturers like Nvidia they are focusing a lot on its multiple uses. Among these we find Nvidia with its ACEwhose latest demonstration is truly astonishing.
Nvidia Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) it is the technology that uses AI to generate so-called digital humans, virtual beings with credible behaviors which in the future could be integrated into video games in the form of NPCs (in Italian PNG, i.e. non-player characters). On the occasion of GDC 2024the green company has decided to show the world the latest results achieved by Nvidia ACE thanks to the tech demo that takes its name Covert Protocol.
In the video, which is accompanied by some insights from the developers, it is underlined that the intention is to ensure that avatars can have realistic behaviors and even simulate emotions. It is also demonstrated how, by interacting with NPCs using a microphone, they can react in different ways based on the input, involving the player like never before. In short, we will be able to chat with passers-by about a video game, who will not respond with the usual pre-established phrases.
Obviously similar results are only possible thanks to the research of the Nvidia teams, who combined various technologies so that digital humans had credible behaviors. It all starts with the player's voice: the input is first processed by Riva Automatic Speech Recognition, which transforms the voice command into a text to be analyzed to understand its meaning. The next step is step a Nemotron LLM, a language model that acts based on 15 billion different parameters and therefore finds the most coherent response possible to the initial input. Finally, there is the combination of Riva Text-to-speech e Audio2Face: the first ensures that the answer is 'recited' by the character and the second acts on the expressiveness of the polygonal model so that they are credible based on what he is saying.
The result is simply incredible and could improve further in a few months. It just remains to be seen when we will be able to see it integrated into large videogame productions.
In the meantime, we remind you that Ubisoft has also unveiled NEO, a technology created in collaboration with Nvidia and Inworld, the authors of Covert Protocol.
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