Nvidia's AI-Generated Toy Jensen Sings Jingle Bells

Nvidia's Toy Jensen sings Jingle Bells
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia has released a festive video featuring a cute bobble head avatar of CEO Jensen Huang singing Jingle Bells. The traditional Christmas song has been jazzed-up 50s crooner style with some cool finger snapping action from the leather jacket draped ‘Toy Jensen. This fun video showcases cool technologies and spreads a little holiday cheer.

The video release isn’t just a way to say happy holidays to Nvidia fans, it also demonstrates the abilities of the Nvidia Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine, or ACE, platform. The performance took “just hours,” to render and demonstrates realistic facial expressions and body movements alongside voice conversion technology which mapped Jensen’s tone to the performance of a pro singer – this isn’t an actual recording of Jensen’s singing voice.

Breaking down the video elements, the Nvidia development team used a recently developed model to map Jensen Huang’s voice tone onto a professional vocalist’s Jingle Bells singing sample. The musical notes from the professional singing were applied to the digital voice of Toy Jensen to make the avatar sing the correct notes and rhythm. It is notable that the musical arrangement for this performance wasn’t AI-generated, but was put together by Jochem van der Saag, a composer and producer who has worked with Michael Bublé and David Foster.

(Image credit: Nvidia)

Next, Omniverse Audio2Face and Audio2Gesture technologies were leveraged to generate realistic facial expressions and gestures to match the Toy Jensen avatar’s animated musical performance. For a fuller X-Factor talent show style performance, we think Nvidia will have to develop some new Audio2Walk-down-steps technology.

Putting the above video into some perspective, Jensen Huang hit the headlines in November when he was visiting Taipei and video-bombed a singing duo. During a Taiwan Esports carnival event he managed to squeeze between Lah Yileh Lee and Xinting Lee during a performance of Lady Gaga’s “Always Remember Us This Way.” The performance went viral, but Huang insists he is too shy to record a real-person rendition of Jingle Bells, so tasked his engineers with readying the Toy Jensen performance, embedded top.

Nvidia says that the Omniverse ACE platform will be available soon for early access partners. It doesn’t say whether the release will include a Toy Jensen to play with.

Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

  • Jer Stryker
    Glad they are putting my money to good use. :rolleyes:
    Reply
  • peachpuff
    Too bad the comments are turned off lol
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    peachpuff said:
    Too bad the comments are turned off lol
    jensen knows what peoples thougths would be.
    He is greedy not stupid.
    Reply
  • husker
    Powerful rendering tools do not equate to "AI". They use the term "AI" as a marketing buzzword these days.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    husker said:
    Powerful rendering tools do not equate to "AI". They use the term "AI" as a marketing buzzword these days.
    The AI is what's allegedly mapping the vocal recording to his voice and generating the facial expressions + gestures from the vocals.

    If this were hand-animated, I'd definitely expect better. If it's truly 100% automatic and without any manual tweaking, I'd say it's pretty good!

    BTW, the vocal mapping sounds a little rough. I don't mind it in small doses, but I wouldn't like to listen to meeting or lecture through a voice filter like that.
    Reply
  • No matter what artificial intelligence is, or isn’t, it will never reach consciousness because consciousness is not computable. AI is good at mimicking human reactions and such but it will never understand why. They will never achieve consciousness. They were never achieve robots that can think and feel.
    Reply
  • Gunkk0
    husker said:
    Powerful rendering tools do not equate to "AI". They use the term "AI" as a marketing buzzword these days.

    That AI is High Definition for sure!
    Reply
  • neojack
    Nickelodeon and other producers of cheap animes will love this ! humanity needs AI-animated Paw Patrol (can't be worse than the previous job)
    Reply
  • thisisaname
    The singing is terrible, it sounds like auto-tune turned up to maximum.
    Reply
  • wicked-warlock
    Mandark said:
    No matter what artificial intelligence is, or isn’t, it will never reach consciousness because consciousness is not computable. AI is good at mimicking human reactions and such but it will never understand why. They will never achieve consciousness. They were never achieve robots that can think and feel.

    Never say never. I'm pretty sure they never thought we would fly, let alone go to the moon. AI as we know is limited. Advances in science has changed many things the past 10 years. It will only improve from there. AI will too.
    Reply