Nvidia Demos AI-Powered Avatars, Image Generation at CES 2024

Nvidia unveiled a slew of AI offerings and products at CES, including new tools to bring generative AI to more developers.

Presented during Nvidia’s CES 2024 showcase were new solutions for its ACE suite of technologies, including tools to help developers build interactive avatars using AI models.

The new avatar-focused tools enable users to build assistants capable of expressive facial animations and multilingual speech and translation.

During a demo created with conversational AI startup Convai, Nvidia showcased digital avatars conversing using generative AI in an environment similar to the CD Projekt Red video game Cyberpunk 2077.

The demo saw a player’s voice input which is passed through Nvidia’s automatic speech recognition model turning it from speech to text. Then, the text is put into an LLM to generate the character’s response. The text response is then vocalized using a text-to-speech model, which is then passed to an animation model to create a realistic lip sync. The dynamic character is then rendered into the game scene.

Keita Iida, vice president of developer relations at Nvidia said: “ACE opens up new possibilities for game developers by populating their worlds with lifelike digital characters while removing the need for pre-scripted dialogue, delivering greater in-game immersion.”

Partnership With Getty

Nvidia also announced at CES that it is powering a new stock image solution from Getty.

IStock by Getty is releasing a generative AI service built on Nvidia Picasso, a cloud-based service for building generative visual solutions.

The new iStock service will allow users to create 4K imagery from text using an AI model trained on Getty Images’ library of content. Users can also make use of an editing application to alter generated images.

The generative AI service is available at istock.com, with advanced editing features soon to follow via API.

RTX Remix Gets Liftoff

Nvidia announced that RTX Remix, an application for Omniverse that lets gamers create mods for games, is set for launch.

Unveiled at the company’s GTC event back in 2022, the RTX Remix app will be released in open beta at the end of January, meaning gamers can create mods for their favorite games.

RTX Remix has already been used to remaster games like Portal, the popular puzzle-solving game from Valve. Now, it is being used to recreate another beloved Valve title, Half-Life 2, with the app enhancing the 20-year-old game’s graphical fidelity.

Nvidia also unveiled a new batch of graphics cards, including the RTX 4080 Super.