Nvidia has given a glimpse of what the future of gaming could be. During its Computex 2023 event, the specialist in chips and graphics cards for PCs and game consoles showed a first demonstration of its new Nvidia ACE tool, reports the specialized site The Verge.
Introduced by company founder Jensen Huang, this device gives game creators the ability to push the boundaries of interaction between a player and game characters. Thanks to artificial intelligence, Nvidia proposes to speak directly to a no – playable character (NPC) using a microphone. These characters then use an AI model to respond to the player.
An interest (for now) difficult to perceive
In the short video presented by Nvidia, the player enters a ramen restaurant in a cyberpunk atmosphere where the graphics use and abuse the play of light. Once seated at the counter across from the owner, the player speaks into their microphone to ask how the manager is doing.
“Unfortunately, not very well,” the character replies before detailing his concerns: “I’m worried about crime in the area. It’s gotten worse lately. My ramen shop has been caught in the crossfire.”
As the conversation progresses, the restaurateur informs us about the presence of a bandit to the east of the city. The classic beginning of a quest in a video game. But as The Verge points out, with this single example, it’s particularly hard to see what this AI-generated text system brings to the table compared to a classic chat tree.
lip sync
Nvidia ACE is powered by the NeMo and Riva language model, which can transcribe spoken speech to text and text to speech. The solution was developed with Convai and can be deployed both on-premises and through a cloud connection.
At the moment, artificial intelligence is not so exploited in video games. The videogames STALKER 2: The Heart of Chernobyl AND Fort Solis will use some of the capabilities put in place by Nvidia. With the “Omniverse Audio2Face” solution, the two titles will be able to adapt the lip synchronization between the 3D character animations and the actors’ voices.
At the beginning of May, the beginnings of Nvidia ACE could be observed within the game skyrim. Fans of the Bethesda-developed role-playing game added ChatGPT to allow supporting characters to express themselves beyond the words previously provided by the developers. As Numerama explains, this made the supporting characters much more talkative. But the solution was not as responsive as Nvidia promised, leading to frequent and long wait times.
Source: BFM TV
