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NVIDIA and Convai team up at CES 2024 for new AI-powered NPC tech

Convai has improved its Kairos demo significantly through the power of NVIDIA's emerging AI technology.

Ozzie Mejia

January 8, 2024 8:30 AM

Convai

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NVIDIA is increasing its footprint in the emerging world of AI with some exciting reveals and collaborations at this year's Consumer Electronics Show. On Monday, NVIDIA showcased the latest efforts from Convai, a platform dedicated to helping game developers integrate smarter AI-powered NPCs into its games. These efforts include some new features that can be seamlessly integrated into today's biggest gaming engines, including Unreal Engine and Unity.

To demonstrate its latest advancements, NVIDIA and Convai showed off an updated Kairos demo. Originally shown off at Computex 2023, the Kairos demo is meant to be an example of more advanced non-playable characters. The latest build now includes advancements from the NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine modules and NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face beta. The former offers a more expressive character model, the latter improves the model's lip syncing and facial animations, and NVIDIA Riva technology adds in low latency speech-to-text tech.

Convai tech has now reached a point where NPC interactions can engage in more real-time actions. NPCs can more fluidly perform actions like fetching items or leading characters to points of interest, as well as perform specific tasks dynamically requested over the course of gameplay. If a player-controlled character is idle, Convai-powered NPCs are now capable of interacting with each other while the user is away. Convai's API has added the power to modify character backstories, personalities, and knowledge levels in order to create a more engaging NPC with more dynamic conversation.

"Generative-AI-powered characters in virtual worlds unlock various use cases and experiences that were previously impossible," Convai founder Purnendu Mukherjee said via press release. "At CES we are showcasing the evolution of Convai's AI NPC technology, presenting first-of-their-kind digital characters that not only have emotionally driven and intelligent conversations, but can understand their environment and carry out actions, all generated in real-time."

Through the power of NVIDIA's emerging AI tech, Convai looks to be improving the way gaming NPCs are designed. This is far from the only thing we're seeing from NVIDIA at this year's Consumer Electronics Show. Be sure to follow the CES 2024 topic page for the latest updates from this year's convention.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?