At Computex 2023 this morning, a demo of the NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) was shown off by CEO Jensen Huang. Through ACE, players can talk to game characters (NPCs) in real time using voice. No dialog tearing and no limited options given in the demo shown earlier.
ACE combines the artificial intelligence (AI) of NVIDIA NeMo, NVIDIA Riva and NVIDIA Ominiverse Audio2Face. NeMo is a language language model (LLM) that can generate dialogue with realistic voices to answer questions given by the player.
Riva understands the player's conversation in real time for NeMo to understand the context of the conversation. Then finally Audio2Face will match the voice audio produced by NeMo with the facial animation of the NPC character. With ACE the process of generating game content is simplified using NVIDIA AI.
The ramen shop demo above was produced by NVIDIA in collaboration with Convai who use their expertise to produce AI characters in video games and virtual worlds. Although the demo looks beautiful and realistic, the tone of the characters' conversations, dialogues and animations displayed seem a bit "dead" for a game in 2023.
Although the use of AI is no longer inevitable with Ubisoft also using a similar system, human writers are still needed to produce more interesting dialogue at this time.