NVIDIA 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. 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.