Nvidia launched its Avatar Cloud Engine to enable easier and faster deployment of interactive avatars for its Omniverse and metaverse applications.
The Omniverse ACE platform, unveiled at the GTC keynote event, enables developers to create AI-powered avatars responding to natural speech and making intelligent recommendations
As part of the keynote, Nvidia showed off Violet, an AI-powered customer service assistant ready to take your order. Nvidia ACE makes it easier to deploy engaging avatars on any crowd. It should be able to understand and communicate with people, and ACE has the building blocks to bring them to life. It uses services like “audio to face” to do things like lip-syncing.
“Emerging metaverse applications like avatars will do computer vision, speech AI, language understanding, and computer graphics in real time and at cloud scale,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, in the GTC 2022 keynote event. “Nothing like this has ever been done before.”
Maxine
Nvidia also showed off Maxine, the latest demo of real-time audio and video communications. Whether for a video conference, a call made to a customer service center, or a live stream, Maxine enables clear communications to enhance virtual interactions.
NVIDIA Maxine is a suite of GPU-accelerated AI software development toolkits (SDKs) and cloud-native microservices for deploying optimized and accelerated AI features that enhance audio, video and augmented-reality (AR) effects in real time.
Meanwhile, Violet is a cloud-based avatar that represents the latest evolution in avatar development through the Omniverse ACE tech, a suite of cloud-native AI microservices that make it easier to build and deploy intelligent virtual assistants and digital humans at scale.
Avatars are virtual characters that will represent us in the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds as envision in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One.
To animate interactive avatars like Violet, developers need to ensure the 3D character can see, hear, understand and communicate with people. But bringing these avatars to life can be challenging, as traditional methods typically require expensive equipment, specific expertise and time-consuming workflows.
The Violet demo showcases how Omniverse ACE eases avatar development, delivering all the AI building blocks necessary to create, customize and deploy interactive avatars. Whether taking restaurant orders or answering questions about the universe, these AI assistants are easily customizable for virtually any industry, and can help organizations enhance existing workflows and unlock new business opportunities.