Earlier last week, The Shortcut had the chance to spend nearly an hour playing around with Nvidia's latest ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) demo, Covert Protocol, at a private event in New York. Nvidia's latest AI-powered NPC game Initially it was a hands-off demo, but this time Matt and I were able to test out how you can currently interact with AI NPCs, asking the AI our own questions and provoking it in a variety of interesting ways.
Nvidia's latest AI NPC demo, Covert Protocol, puts you in the shoes of Marcus Pierce, a private investigator looking into the fictional biotech company NexaLife. Your goal is to break into CTO Martin Laine's private hotel suite and scout the surroundings. Set in a lavish, cyberpunk-style hotel lobby, there are four AI NPCs to interact with, each with their own personality. Jason is a friendly bellhop who'll tell you all about his dreams, while Diego is gruff and doesn't want to be bothered.
There are a few ways to find out the pharma bigwig's room number: you can find a package addressed to Martin and tell Diego you're here to deliver it, or you can take advantage of Diego's down-to-earth nature and tell him the hotel room he's waiting in is fully booked, and then eavesdrop on his conversation with Sofia at the front desk.
What's great about this demo is that instead of choosing lines from a circle or a list, you create all of your character's lines yourself and have an AI NPC instantly respond to you based on what you say. Say goodbye to the dialogue wheel and enter the era of choosing your own words with your own voice.
Nearly all AI NPCs open up slowly, requiring more conversation to give you a little more information. This gradual interaction with the AI NPCs makes them feel a bit more real and makes the overall experience less scripted – after all, when was the last time you barged into someone's room asking for information and it worked?
What’s even more surprising is that even if you use the wrong word, the AI can intelligently guess your intention and answer your question, as in the excerpt below:
Me: Where is the ball ring?
James: The ballroom, sir.
James: It's on the second floor, right next to the famous indoor pool.
The backstories of these AI digital humans are also surprisingly deep. During the demo, we asked James if he had any other dreams, and he revealed his passion for bartending and offered us a mixed drink. When we asked him more, he revealed that he also wants to create the ultimate cocktail, a special suitcase set, and a clothing line, all of which he wants to call Bellboy Specials.
AI can also be manipulated into believing hoaxes. One Nvidia rep told me they managed to trick Diego into believing that his wife had taken NexaLife drugs to get pregnant without his knowledge.
But you can't make an AI believe whatever it wants. During the demo, I tried to get Diego to believe that his wife took NexaLife pills to change her eye color, and that she was my ex-wife. In the latter case, I think my lie ended up being too ridiculous.
Tinkering with AI is fun, but its limitations are quickly demonstrated when Diego blasts away almost all the chatter while James tries to name all his creations Bellboy Special and Bellboy Express. Everything an AI NPC does or says is drawn from a pool of information and characteristics programmed into InWorld's AI game engine. Nvidia showed us how Diego's system works: His character is built to be aggressive, dominant and pragmatic.
Overall, the experience of conversing with an AI digital human is exciting, even if it's still in its early stages. Nvidia ACE's AI NPCs have less noticeable response delays, as all interactions are now generated by Nvidia's graphics card. Nvidia ACE no longer necessarily needs to query responses from cloud-based LLM servers, which could lead to the technology being introduced into offline single-player games.
There's still a lot to do, but I'm looking forward to actually talking to NPCs in the future and saying goodbye to dialogue trees.
Kevin Lee is the creative director of The Shortcut, but his lies don't work on AI NPCs any more than they do on real people.
