NVIDIA’s Special Address CES 2024 keynote included an extended look at the enhanced NVIDIA ACE ‘Kairos’ demo. The demo set in a cyberpunk bar originally premiered at Computex 2023, showcasing the AI conversational capabilities of the Avatar Cloud Engine when applied to non-player characters (NPCs). It was developed in conjunction with Convai, a company founded specifically to make technology that would allow game developers to create NPCS with conversational and multimodal perception capabilities. These characters can integrate seamlessly into the virtual worlds of their games.
At Gamescom 2023, we got to see an updated NVIDIA ACE demo featuring customizable parameters and attributes for NPCs. In Las Vegas, the Kairos demo is even better, thanks to a series of major feature additions. For example, game characters have been empowered with spatial awareness so that they may recognize and interact with nearby objects and have conversations about their surroundings. The player can point at the items and the NPC will speak intelligently about the item.
They can also interact with items in the game world based on the conversation. Players can ask them to fetch a certain nearby object, for instance. Moreover, interactions between NPCs have been enabled, improving the world’s immersive factor even when the player is simply walking by. Of course, NPC conversations are nothing new, but they will be different every time with NVIDIA ACE rather than repeating on a regular basis. ACE Microservices is now available to developers to enhance their games and applications. It comes with NVIDIA Audio2Face (A2F), which creates real-time facial animations from an audio source, and NVIDIA Riva Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which allows players to speak directly to NPCs rather than typing.
Wccftech CEO Abdullah Saad checked out the new NVIDIA ACE demo in person, as you can see in the exclusive footage embedded below.
As we can see from the video, the technology isn’t perfect yet. Sometimes, the NPCs wouldn’t understand the voice commands. Still, it is absolutely impressive, especially since it evolved so quickly from the first iteration of the demo.
As a bonus footage from CES 2024, our CEO was also shown a side-by-side comparison of Half-Life 2 RTX with the original game. As a reminder, Half-Life 2 RTX is currently being developed by a team of modders known as Orbital Software. However, starting on January 22, everyone will be able to use the RTX Remix technology to remaster older games with NVIDIA DLSS, path tracing, AI upscaled and PBR-enhanced assets, and more.
