Meet Violet, an AI-powered customer service assistant ready to take your order.
Unveiled this week at GTC, Violet is a cloud-based avatar that represents the latest evolution of avatar development via the NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), a suite of cloud-native AI microservices that facilitate the creation and deployment of intelligent virtual assistants. and large-scale digital humans.
To animate interactive avatars like Violet, developers must ensure that the 3D character can see, hear, understand, and communicate with people. But bringing these avatars to life can be incredibly difficult, as traditional methods typically require expensive equipment, specific expertise, and time-consuming workflows.
The Violet demo shows how Omniverse ACE makes avatar development easy, providing all the basic AI elements needed to create, customize, and deploy interactive avatars. From taking restaurant orders to answering questions about the universe, these AI assistants are easily customizable for virtually any industry and can help organizations improve existing workflows and unlock new new business opportunities.
Watch the video below to see Violet interact with users, respond to voice prompts, and make smart recommendations:
How Omniverse ACE brings Violet to life
The demo features Violet as a fully rigged avatar with basic animation. To create Violet, NVIDIA’s creative team used the company’s Unified Computing Framework, a fully accelerated framework that allows developers to combine optimized and accelerated microservices into real-time AI applications. UCF helped the team create a graph of microservices for Violet that have been deployed in the cloud.
Omniverse ACE powers the interactive avatars backend, essentially acting as Violet’s brain. Additionally, two reference applications are built on ACE: NVIDIA Tokkio and NVIDIA Maxine.
Violet was developed using the Tokkio app workflow, which allows interactive avatars to see, perceive, intelligently converse and provide recommendations to improve customer service, both online and in places like restaurants and stores.
NVIDIA Maxine offers a suite of GPU-accelerated AI SDKs and cloud-native microservices for deploying AI capabilities to improve real-time video communications. Maxine integrates the automatic speech recognition and real-time text-to-speech capabilities of the NVIDIA Riva SDK with real-time “live portrait” photo animation and eye contact features, which enable better communication and understanding.
Latest Microservices Expand Possibilities for Avatars
The demo with Violet shows how developers of digital humans and virtual assistants can use Omniverse ACE to speed up their avatar development workflows. Omniverse ACE also provides microservices that give developers access to the best NVIDIA AI technology, with no coding required.
Some of the latest microservices include:
- Animation AI: Omniverse Audio2Face makes it easy to animate a 3D character to match any voiceover track, helping users animate characters for games, movies, or real-time digital assistants.
- Conversational AI: Includes the NVIDIA Riva SDK for voice AI and the NVIDIA NeMo Megatron framework for natural language processing, enabling developers to quickly build and deploy industry-leading applications that deliver high-precision, expressive voices and respond in real time.
AI avatars offer new transformations across industries
ACE-enabled AI avatars will enhance interactive experiences in industries such as gaming, entertainment, transportation and hospitality.
Professional services leader Deloitte has partnered with NVIDIA to help enterprises deploy transformative applications. At GTC, Deloitte announced that new hybrid cloud offerings for NVIDIA AI and NVIDIA Omniverse services and platforms, including Omniverse ACE, will be added to the existing Deloitte Center for AI Computing.
“Cloud-based AI models and services are opening up new ways for digital humans to feel more connected, and today’s interaction with Violet in the NVIDIA GTC keynote provides insight into the future of AI-powered avatars,” said Vladimir Mastilović, Vice President of Digital Human Technology at Epic Games. “We’re excited to see NVIDIA Omniverse ACE using MetaHumans in Unreal Engine 5 to make it even easier to deploy engaging, high-fidelity 3D avatars.”
NVIDIA Omniverse ACE will be available to early access partners from the end of this year, along with the Tokkio reference application for a simplified customer service avatar implementation.
Learn more about Omniverse ACE by joining this session at GTC and explore all the technologies that go into creating and animating realistic and interactive digital humans.
Customers can request the hands-on demo of Tokkio on the web.
Developers and partners can sign up to be notified when ACE is available.
And find the latest announcements from the GTC keynote of NVIDIA founder and CEO, Jensen Huang:
