KRAFTON will provide an in-depth look at artificial intelligence technology slated for application in PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS at GDC (Game Developers Conference), the world’s largest game developer conference, through a collaboration with NVIDIA.

KRAFTON will host a joint session with NVIDIA on March 11 (local time). The session is titled “Building an Interactive Pipeline for PUBG: Ally, an AI Teammate Powered by NVIDIA ACE.” Speakers will include Kim Hyunseung, AI Companion Team Lead and Deep Learning Researcher at KRAFTON’s AI organization, and Evgeny Makarov, Principal Developer Technology Engineer at NVIDIA.

At the center of the presentation is PUBG Ally, an AI companion that interacts with users in real time. Rather than a bot that simply follows predetermined patterns, it is equipped with capabilities to respond to player commands, crack jokes, and engage in conversation. Through this, KRAFTON aims to add fun and personality to each match.

Through the session, the two companies plan to disclose the technical details of the full interactive pipeline used to implement PUBG Ally. The pipeline consists of automatic speech recognition (ASR) that converts speech to text, a small language model (SLM), and text-to-speech (TTS) technology that converts text back into speech. This entire process runs on NVIDIA’s AI platform, ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine).

Attendees will be able to see, through PUBG Ally’s architecture, how the ASR, SLM, and TTS pipeline works together cohesively in a live environment. In particular, given PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS’ real-time combat demands, the session is expected to focus heavily on latency-reduction techniques that are essential to the experience.

The presentation will also include technical details on optimizing inference performance using NVIDIA Nemotron. In addition, it will demonstrate practical methodologies for calculating latency metrics and reducing them in order to ensure smooth player interaction.

Kim Hyunseung, who will present on behalf of KRAFTON, is currently enrolled in a doctoral program at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) and is leading development of PUBG Ally, a Co-Playable Character (CPC) initiative within KRAFTON’s AI division. His research focuses on embodied agents capable of intelligent, real-time interaction in complex game environments, based on both large language models (LLMs) and small language models (SLMs).

Organizers identified the session’s primary target audience as AI and gameplay programmers interested in integrating generative AI into real-time game loops, technical directors evaluating on-device inference architectures, and engineers seeking to optimize machine-learning pipelines for low-latency interactive applications.

The session has been assigned to the Game and Production Technology track, and admission is available to holders of the Festival Pass and Game Changer Pass.

This article was translated from the original that appeared on INVEN.