On Tuesday, the US chip giant Nvidia introduced the production microservices NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) that enable game developers, tool creators, and middleware developers to integrate generative AI models into the digital avatars within their games and applications. Chinese developers NetEase, Tencent, and HoYoverse are among the first major gaming studios utilizing this new platform. The ACE platform allows game developers to create interactive non-playable characters (NPCs) by using AI models such as NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face (A2F) and NVIDIA Riva automatic speech recognition (ASR). These technologies can translate spoken words from players into text, enabling AI NPCs to reply using a distinct text-to-speech tool, creating fully voiced and interactive game characters with expressive facial expressions. [Nvidia]
