NVIDIA on August 9 introduced the Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), a set of cloud-native AI models and services that make it easy to create and customize realistic digital humans and virtual assistants.
By bringing these models and services to the cloud, ACE enables companies of any size to instantly access the massive computing power needed to create and deploy assistants and avatars that understand multiple languages, respond to voice prompts, interact with the environment and make smart recommendations.
“Our industry spent decades teaching computers to communicate and perform complex tasks with ease that humans take for granted,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “NVIDIA ACE makes this possible. It combines many of our most sophisticated technologies, allowing developers to create assistants and avatars that are well on their way to passing the Turing test (the ultimate assessment of whether an AI demonstrates behavior indistinguishable from a human).”
ACE is built on NVIDIA’s Unified Compute Framework, which provides access to the rich software tools and APIs needed to harness the wide range of skills needed to create highly realistic and interactive avatars. These include: NVIDIA Riva to develop speech AI applications; NVIDIA Metropolis for computer vision and intelligent video analysis; NVIDIA Merlin™ for high performance recommender systems; NVIDIA NeMo Megatron for large language models with natural language understanding; and NVIDIA Omniverse for AI-based animation.
The assistants and avatars enabled by ACE will transform interactions between gaming, entertainment, banking, transportation and hospitality.
Two ACE-based applications include two NVIDIA initiatives: Project Maxine and Project Tokkio. The Maxine Project brings next-generation video and audio capabilities to virtual collaboration and content creation applications. The Tokkio Project gives avatars the ability to see, perceive, intelligently converse and suggest recommendations in real time to improve customer service in places like restaurants.
ACE receives wide support in the industry
Virtual assistant and digital human developers plan to use ACE to accelerate their avatar development efforts.
“Developers using Reallusion can quickly and easily create compelling characters. Now we have taken a step forward with the latest advances in artificial intelligence and real-time rendering,” said Elvis Huang, chief innovation officer of the Innovation Development Department at Reallusion, Inc. “By tying our Character Creator and iClone tools with Omniverse Avatar NVIDIA’s Cloud Engine will be a great way to create realistic avatars that interact with end users in realistic ways.”
According to Kevin Krewell, Principal Analyst at TIRIAS Research, “The demand for digital humans and virtual assistants continues to grow exponentially across all industries, but creating and scaling them is becoming more complex. NVIDIA’s Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine brings together all the AI cloud-based microservices needed to more easily create and deliver realistic, interactive avatars at scale.”
In conversation with the media, Marcio Aguiar, Commercial Director of NVIDIA Enterprise for Latin America, commented: “The Omniverse ACE announced today will make it easier for the growing number of Latin American developers to develop applications for games, digital twins and virtual worlds.”
Illustration: Frame, avatar of Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.