During Computex 2023, Nvidia announced Nvidia Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), which is a custom AI model meant to bring intelligence to NPCs through AI-powered natural language interactions.

These tools are specifically meant for game developers to build customized speech, conversations, and animation for their characters. Think of something like creating a character who can give the player a quest, only instead of writing and scripting a preset one, it can be adapted through these AI tools.

Nvidia released a short tech demo showcasing ACE in action:

The demo above was created via the Unreal Engine 5 while using the tools within ACE. The specific tools in this set are built in Nvidia Omniverse and are known as:

• 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 instantly creating expressive facial animation of a game character to match any speech track. Audio2Face features Omniverse connectors for Unreal Engine 5, so developers can add facial animation directly to MetaHuman characters.

Given its use in Unreal Engine 5 for this demo, they have shown this technology can work in mainstream game engines. Whether developers choose to develop their games with this in mind is a different story, however.

AI has seen a massive explosion in growth over the past year, namely thanks to its ease of access to mainstream audiences such as through text or art. It’s no surprise Nvidia, who has been among some who are pushing heavily into the field, would attempt to implement this into gaming.

This is Niche Gamer Tech. In this column, we regularly cover tech and things related to the tech industry.