NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang introduces 'James' a digital human that you'll be able to interact with

At SIGGRAPH 2024, NVIDIA introduced and expanded on the future of digital humans by introducing its latest AI advancement - adding a path-traced realistic-looking human face (and voice) with emotion and detailed animation to the idea of interacting with an AI assistant. This is a massive leap forward compared to the usual text-based interface for AI chatbots and assistants, and it was brought to life by the latest in RTX technologies.

2

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and 'James,' the realistic digital human, image credit: NVIDIA.

'James' is built using similar NVIDIA ACE technology that we went hands-on with at Computex 2024 as part of an interactive game demonstration where you interact with digital humans in real-time to solve a mystery. This time, however, it's being used in the context of a virtual assistant or customer service agent.

'James' is also built on NVIDIA NIM microservices; Jensen Huang explains how it works and confirms that the visual 'RTX On' front end can connect to existing AI chatbots like ChatGPT.

"An AI that can speak, make eye contact with you, and animate in an empathetic way," Jensen Huang explains. "You could decide to connect your ChatGPT AI to the digital human, or you could connect your digital human to our Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) customer service AI. Irrespective of which piece you would like to use, they're completely open-source."

"The digital human rendering technology that we've created for rendering beautiful faces, which require subsurface scattering with path tracing, is really quite incredible," Jensen Huang continues. You chat with the AI; it generates text. That text is translated to sound, text to speech, and that speech is the sound that animates the face. Then, RTX path tracing handles the rendering of the digital human. All of this is available for developers to use. And you could decide which parts you would like to use."

With the technology being open-source and broken up into various components, like NVIDIA's Audio2Face technology, which handles all of the animations for speech, developers can pick and choose what to use. So, it sounds like it'll only be a matter of time before interacting with AI chatbots across various platforms will begin to feature realistic digital humans.