NVIDIA has officially announced the general availability of its ACE generative AI microservices, a suite designed to accelerate the development of lifelike digital humans. According to NVIDIA Newsroom, this significant technological advance aims to revolutionize industries such as gaming, healthcare, and customer service.
Expanding Capabilities with ACE
The ACE (Avatar Creation Engine) microservices suite includes various technologies that enable the creation and animation of realistic digital humans. These technologies are now generally available for cloud deployment and early access for RTX AI PCs. Companies such as Dell Technologies, ServiceNow, and Perfect World Games have already started integrating ACE into their operations.
Technologies included in the ACE suite are:
- NVIDIA Riva for automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and neural machine translation (NMT).
- NVIDIA Nemotron for language understanding and contextual response generation.
- NVIDIA Audio2Face for realistic facial animation based on audio tracks.
- NVIDIA Omniverse RTX for real-time, path-traced realistic skin and hair rendering.
Future Technologies on the Horizon
NVIDIA also announced upcoming technologies such as NVIDIA Audio2Gesture, which generates body gestures based on audio tracks, and NVIDIA Nemotron-3 4.5B, a new small language model designed for low-latency, on-device RTX AI PC inference.
“Digital humans will revolutionize industries,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Breakthroughs in multi-modal large language models and neural graphics — delivered by NVIDIA ACE to our ecosystem of developers — are bringing us closer to a future of intent-driven computing, where interacting with computers is as natural as interacting with humans.”
ACE in Action
To date, NVIDIA has provided ACE as NIM (NVIDIA Inference Model) microservices for developers to operate in data centers. The company is now expanding this offering to over 100 million RTX AI PCs and laptops. The new AI Inference Manager SDK simplifies the deployment of ACE on PCs by preconfiguring them with necessary AI models and dependencies.
At COMPUTEX, NVIDIA showcased an updated version of the Covert Protocol tech demo, developed in collaboration with Inworld AI. The demo allows players to interact with digital-human NPCs using conversational language to complete missions.
Industry Adoption and Future Prospects
Companies like Aww Inc., Inventec, and Perfect World Games are pioneering the adoption of ACE technologies. Aww Inc. plans to use ACE Audio2Face microservices for real-time animation of its virtual celebrity, Imma. Perfect World Games is integrating ACE into its mythological wilderness tech demo, Legends, enabling players to interact with multilingual AI NPCs.
Inventec is using ACE to enhance its healthcare AI agent within the VRSTATE platform, providing a more engaging virtual consultation experience. ServiceNow showcased ACE NIM in a generative AI service agent demo for its Now Assist Gen AI Experience, highlighting its potential to improve customer and employee interactions.
Innovations at COMPUTEX 2024
NVIDIA art teams also utilized generative AI tools built on ACE to produce a “digital Jensen” avatar for COMPUTEX 2024. This multilingual avatar featured Huang’s unique voice and style, generated using ElevenLabs’ AI speech and voice technology in Mandarin Chinese and English.
The ACE NIM microservices, including Riva and Audio2Face, are now in production, adding NVIDIA AI Enterprise software for developers to receive enterprise-class support. Early access to ACE NIM microservices running on RTX AI PCs is also available.
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