At COMPUTEX 2023, NVIDIA announced Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games, a service aimed at giving video-game non-player characters (NPCs) generative-AI brains and voices so players can talk to them in natural language instead of clicking through scripted dialogue trees. NVIDIA’s official press release, dated May 28, 2023, called it “a custom AI model foundry service that transforms games by bringing intelligence to non-playable characters (NPCs) through AI-powered natural language interactions.”
ACE bundles three of NVIDIA’s existing AI components: NeMo “for building, customizing and deploying language models,” Riva “for automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech to enable live speech conversation,” and Audio2Face “for instantly creating expressive facial animation of a game character to match any speech track.” Together they let an NPC listen, reason, reply, and lip-sync in real time.
The announcement was anchored by a demo called Kairos, built with the startup Convai, in which players spoke to Jin, a ramen-shop owner, who “replies to natural language queries realistically and consistent with the narrative backstory - all with the help of generative AI.” ACE marked a high-profile push to move large language models from chat windows into interactive characters, raising both excitement about emergent, unscripted NPCs and open questions about latency, cost, consistency, and writer control.