NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), a suite of cloud-native AI models and services that make it easier to build and customize lifelike virtual assistants and digital humans. By bringing these models and services to the cloud, ACE enables businesses of any size to instantly access the massive computing power needed to create and deploy assistants and avatars that understand multiple languages, respond to speech prompts, interact with the environment and make intelligent recommendations.

"Our industry has been on a decades-long journey teaching computers to communicate and carry out complex tasks with ease that humans take for granted," said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA ACE brings this within reach. ACE combines many sophisticated AI technologies, allowing developers to create digital assistants that are on a path to pass the Turing test."ACE is built on top of NVIDIA's Unified Compute Framework, which provides access to the rich software tools and APIs needed to harness the wide range of skills needed for highly realistic, fully interactive avatars. These include NVIDIA Riva for developing speech AI applications, NVIDIA Metropolis for computer vision and intelligent video analytics, NVIDIA Merlin for high-performing recommender systems, NVIDIA NeMo Megatron for large language models with natural language understanding, and NVIDIA Omniverse for AI-enabled animation.

The assistants and avatars ACE enables will transform interactions in gaming, entertainment, banking, transportation and hospitality.

Two applications built on ACE include NVIDIA's Project Maxine and Project Tokkio. Project Maxine brings state-of-the-art video and audio features to virtual collaboration and content creation applications. Project Tokkio enables interactive avatars that see, perceive, converse intelligently and provide recommendations to enhance customer service in places like restaurants.

Omniverse ACE Support
Developers of virtual assistants and digital humans plan to use ACE to accelerate their avatar development efforts.

"Reallusion developers can build convincing characters quickly and easily, and now we step forward with the latest advancements in artificial intelligence and real-time rendering," said Elvis Huang, head of innovation in the Innovation Development Department at Reallusion, Inc. "Pairing our Character Creator and iClone tools with NVIDIA's Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine will be a great way to create lifelike avatars that interact with end users realistically."

"Demand for digital humans and virtual assistants continues to grow exponentially across industries, but creating and scaling them is getting increasingly complex," said Kevin Krewell, principal analyst at TIRIAS Research. "NVIDIA's Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine brings together all of the AI cloud-based microservices needed to more easily create and deliver lifelike, interactive avatars at scale."

Learn more about Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine.