Amazing Seasun Games’ Mecha Break is expected to become the first title to implement Nvidia’s ACE and Digital Human Tech. With it, you will be able to communicate with in-game NPCs (non-player characters) using your mic.
A new era of gaming is upon us as the first game to integrate a wealth of new tech. Nvidia’s ACE (avatar cloud engine) is a suite of technologies that enables communication with a so-called Digital Human, Whisper ASR (automatic speech recognition) is a speech recognition neural net said to approach the human level, and ElevenLabs’ TTS (text-to-speech) is a high-quality voice generator supporting multiple styles and languages.
Such a combination of features should allow the game to have human-like AI chatbots with varying personalities and backgrounds. This will also make each character feel unique while potentially simplifying developers’ lives as they no longer have to manually code each interaction. The result is a more lifelike and engaging world.
The difference between Nvidia’s implementation and other existing techniques is that this one will run locally on your GPU, thus making it more seamless and less laggy. Having that extra delay as the AI does its calculations on the Cloud was jarring and immersion-breaking, so this solution is much better, at least on paper.
Of course, this brings up the question of performance. We don’t yet know the system requirements for the feature, but an educated guess would assume it’ll demand far more memory to process requests in real time, limiting this to just the best graphics cards. Time will tell.
While Nvidia demonstrated ACE capabilities during multiple events, the results weren’t perfect. It was a bunch of fun at CES 2024 hearing the bartender recognise the cultural differences between tea and chai, but he still had limited responses, staying silent when it didn’t recognise a question. It seems as though it might’ve come a long way since. If so, game interactions may soon reach the next level, to the pleasure of RPG (role-playing game) fans.
Since it also generates vocals via AI, there is an underlying controversy. Not only does it pose ethical concerns, but it could turn the industry on its head. I can’t comment on its current quality, but it was abundantly clear that the pipes didn’t come from a human back in January.
Should we solve these quandaries, my wishlist is to see something like this appear in an expansive open-world fantasy RPG. With The Elder Scrolls 6 still years ahead, Bethesda should definitely consider implementing something similar. Otherwise, the community will put it to shame using mods. Heck, some can’t wait and have already done it in Skyrim and The Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 demo. I can’t wait to ask an NPC what came first: the egg or chicken – Editor’s note: it’s the egg, by the way.