From gaming or film production to customer service, everywhere we need Artificial Intelligence interaction for the best result. To make avatars and digital characters feel truly lifelike, they need natural facial expressions and accurate lip-syncing. That’s where NVIDIA Audio2Face comes in.
On September 24, 2025, NVIDIA officially announced that it is open-sourcing Audio2Face, AI model for real-time facial animation. This move accelerate to make avatar creation more accessible, customizable, and scalable than ever before.
What Is NVIDIA Audio2Face?
Audio2Face is a generative AI model that transforms audio input into realistic 3D facial animations.
- It analyzes speech patterns, phonemes, intonation, and emotional cues.
- It generates corresponding facial poses, lip-sync, and emotional expressions.
- It works for both offline pre-rendered content and real-time streaming applications, making it ideal for video games, customer support avatars, and immersive 3D experiences.
This technology allows avatars to speak and emote naturally, improving digital engagement across entertainment, education, healthcare, and more.
Why Open-Source Audio2Face?
By making Audio2Face open source, NVIDIA empowers developers, researchers, and creators to:
- Access free models and SDKs without licensing costs.
- Fine-tune and train their own models for specific projects.
- Integrate easily into popular tools like Unreal Engine and Autodesk Maya.
- Collaborate with the community to improve features and performance.
This open-source approach creates a feedback loop, where innovations from the developer community can enhance NVIDIA’s tools for broader use cases.
What’s Included in the Open-Source Release?
NVIDIA has released a complete set of SDKs, plugins, models, and training frameworks.
1. Audio2Face SDK and Plugins
| Package | Use |
|---|---|
| Audio2Face SDK | Libraries and documentation for creating runtime facial animations on-device or in the cloud. |
| Autodesk Maya Plugin (v2.0) | Local execution plugin that generates facial animations for characters in Maya. |
| Unreal Engine 5 Plugin (v2.5) | Supports UE 5.5 and 5.6 to enable audio-driven facial animations in real time. |
| Audio2Face Training Framework (v1.0) | Framework to train and customize models with user-provided datasets. |
2. Models and Training Data
| Package | Use |
|---|---|
| Audio2Face Training Sample Data | Example data for experimenting with the training framework. |
| Audio2Face Models | Regression (v2.2) and diffusion (v3.0) models for lip-sync. |
| Audio2Emotion Models | Production (v2.2) and experimental (v3.0) models for detecting emotions from audio. |
Real-World Adoption and Industry Use Cases
NVIDIA’s Audio2Face is already being deployed widely across gaming, media, and customer engagement platforms.
Gaming
- Codemasters and GSC Games World integrated Audio2Face to bring lifelike expressions to NPCs.
- Survios, developers of Alien: Rogue Incursion Evolved Edition, used it to streamline lip-syncing, cutting production time and enhancing immersion.
- The Farm 51 applied Audio2Face in Chernobylite 2: Exclusion Zone, generating high-quality animations directly from audio and saving hundreds of hours of manual animation work.
Media & Entertainment
- Reallusion integrated Audio2Face into iClone, Character Creator, and AI Assistant, offering multilingual, expressive character animation with editing tools like AccuLip and face puppeteering.
Customer Service & Virtual Humans
- Companies like UneeQ Digital Humans and Inworld AI use Audio2Face for realistic digital assistants that engage customers in natural conversation.
Advantages of Using Audio2Face
- Time Savings – Cuts animation workflows by automating lip-sync and expressions.
- Cost Reduction – Lowers reliance on expensive motion-capture systems.
- Scalability – Works in both small indie projects and enterprise-scale deployments.
- Cross-Platform Integration – Supports major 3D tools and engines like Unreal Engine 5, Maya, and Omniverse.
- Realism – Delivers accurate speech-driven animations and emotional context.
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Beyond Audio2Face – Other NVIDIA Updates for Developers
NVIDIA also announced updates to its RTX Kit, vGPU technology, and Nsight developer tools alongside the Audio2Face open-source release.
RTX Kit Updates
- Neural Texture Compression SDK now optimizes large texture sets with reduced memory usage.
- RTX Global Illumination SDK adds new rendering features and debugging tools for indirect lighting.
NVIDIA vGPU for Game Studios
- Enables GPU resource sharing in virtualized environments.
- Activision replaced 100 legacy servers with 6 RTX GPU-powered units, reducing footprint by 82% and power usage by 72%, while running 250,000+ daily tasks for 3,000 developers.
Nsight Tools Training at SIGGRAPH 2025
- Developers learned how to optimize ray-tracing, shaders, and VRAM management using the latest Nsight Graphics and Nsight Systems tools.
- Recordings are available on NVIDIA On-Demand for those who missed the sessions.
How to Get Started
- Download the SDK and plugins from the NVIDIA Developer Zone.
- Join the developer community on Discord to share work and get feedback.
- Access GitHub repositories for open-source code and training data.
- Watch tutorials on NVIDIA’s YouTube and On-Demand platforms.
Conclusion
By open-sourcing Audio2Face, NVIDIA is making high-quality avatar creation more accessible than ever. From gaming and film to education and customer service, developers can now build expressive, emotionally intelligent avatars without huge costs.
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FAQ
Q1: What is NVIDIA Audio2Face used for?
A: Audio2Face generates realistic facial animations and lip-sync from audio, making avatars more expressive and lifelike.
Q2: Is Audio2Face free?
A: Yes. NVIDIA has made the SDK, plugins, and models open-source, available to all developers.
Q3: Which platforms support Audio2Face?
A: It integrates with Unreal Engine 5, Autodesk Maya, NVIDIA Omniverse, and can be extended via SDKs.
Q4: Who is already using Audio2Face?
A: Companies like Reallusion, Codemasters, Survios, Inworld AI, and The Farm 51 have successfully deployed it in games and character animation workflows