To celebrate Christmas and to make a nice little publicity stunt in the process.
Mainly known for its GPUs, NVIDIA is no longer limited to graphics processors/cards. The computing power of its solutions has opened new horizons that it hastened to embrace so that it is now at the forefront of everything related to artificial intelligence (AI) and server components. Its boss, Jen-Hsun 'Jensen' Huang, never misses an opportunity to insist on diversifying the activities of the company he founded 30 years ago next April.
Lately, Jen-Hsun Huang has been having fun talking about a kind of avatar in his likeness. Known as Toy Jensen, this character has already spoken on several occasions when, for example, various questions had to be answered during the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2021. The idea was to show the computing power of NVIDIA solutions and the company has just rededicated itself to celebrating Christmas. Toy Jensen "grabbed" the microphone to sing a song called " Jingle Bells ". Told by NVIDIA on its official blog, the story is also a great way to showcase the richness of theOmniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), " a collection of cloud-based AI models and services that enable developers to easily create, customize and deploy engaging and interactive avatars," in the company's words.
Jen-Hsun Huang clarifies that he is " too shy " to intone the little song himself. The teams working on ACE were therefore forced to take over. Toy Jensen is dressed in the inevitable leather jacket and his facial animations and gestures (limited for the moment) are inspired by the president of NVIDIA. Without going into detail about the development, the company says that while " the team behind Omniverse ACE technologies spent years developing and refining the technology featured in the performance, turning the music track they created into a polished video took only a few hours."
NVIDIA explains that they used " a recently developed voice conversion model to extract a professional singer's voice from a sample and turn it into TJ's [Toy Jensen's] voice - originally developed by training on hours of actual recordings. Next, the project team " took the musical notes from that sample and applied them to TJ's digital voice to make the avatar sing the same notes and with the same rhythm as the original singer. Finally, NVIDIA obviously emphasizes the potential of its solution for virtual events, online education, and customer service, to name a few.
