Nvidia AI NPCs make next-gen video game characters incredibly lifelike
Nvidia's latest AI NPC demo made fooling everyone my favorite game mechanic
Earlier last week The Shortcut got almost a full hour to play around and mess with Nvidia’s latest ACE (or Avatar Cloud Engine) demo named Covert Protocol at a closed-door event in NYC. We first saw Nvidia’s latest AI-powered NPC game as a hands-off demo – but this time Matt and I were able to ask the AI questions ourselves and prod it in all sorts of funny and interesting ways while testing the edges of how you can interact with an AI NPC today.
Nvidia’s latest AI NPC demo “Covert Protocol” places you in the shoes of Marcus Pierce, a private detective trying to investigate a fictional NexaLife biotech firm. Now your goal is to get into the CTO Martin Laine's private hotel suite to snoop around. The ritzy cyberpunk-styled hotel lobby has four AI NPCs you can interact with and they have different personalities. Jason is the friendly bellboy who will wax on his multiple dreams while Diego speaks curtly and would much rather not be bothered.
Now there are a few ways to discover this Big Pharma magnate’s room number. You can find a package addressed to Martin and tell Diego you're here to deliver it. Alternatively, you can take advantage of Diego’s no-nonsense personality by telling him that the hotel room he’s waiting for has been overbooked. You can then eavesdrop on his conversation with Sophia at the front desk.
The cool thing about the demo is you aren’t picking dialogue from a circle or list, you make all of your own character’s dialogue and the AI NPCs will come up with a response on the fly based on what you said yourself. Goodbye, dialogue wheels, and say hello to choosing your own words in your own voice.
Almost all the AI NPCs will open up slowly, so you’ll have to go at a more conversational to get a drip-feed of information. This gradual interaction with the AI NPCs makes them feel a bit more real and makes the whole experience less scripted. After all, when was the last time you barged into a room asking someone for information and it worked out for you?
What else was surprising was if you flub a word, the AI is smart enough to infer what you meant and still answer the question for you like in this excerpt below.
Me: Where is the ball ring?
James: Ballroom, Sir.
James: And it’s on the second floor, right next to our famous indoor swimming pool.
The backstories of these AI digital humans can be surprisingly deep too. During our demo, we asked James if he had any other dreams and he revealed his passion for bartending and recommended a mixed drink for us. After a little more digging James also revealed he wanted to make the ultimate cocktail, a special set of luggage, and a clothing line and that he would name them all the Bellboy Special.
You can also mess with the AI and convince them to believe in your fabricated stories. One Nvidia representative told me they were able to convince Diego that his wife took NexaLife medicine to get pregnant behind his back.
However, you can’t make the AI believe anything you’d like. During my demo, I attempted to make Diego believe that his wife took NexaLife pills to change the color of her eyes and that she was my ex-wife – the latter of which probably made my lie too absurd.
Now as fun as it is to mess with the AI, it’s easy to see the edges when James wants to name all of his creations the Bellboy Special or Bellboy Express and Diego will swat away almost any kind of small talk. Everything the AI NPCs do and say is drawn from a pool of information and characteristics programmed into InWorld’s AI gaming engine. Nvidia let us see how the system runs under the hood for Diego, and his character is built to be assertive, dominant, and no-nonsense.
Overall, the experience of talking to AI digital humans is exciting even if it’s still in its infancy. Nvidia ACE’s AI NPCs respond with less of a noticeable delay now that all their interactions are being generated on Nvidia’s graphics cards. Now that Nvidia ACE doesn’t necessarily have to query responses from cloud-based LLM servers, it’s possible this technology could come to offline single-player games.
There’s still a lot of work to be done, but I’m excited to actually talk to NPCs in the future and kiss dialogue trees goodbye.
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director his lies work no more on AI NPCs than they do on real people.