NVIDIA wants to make video calls better with AI

Video calling has become more common than ever following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. To help your calls look and sound better, NVIDIA has unveiled an AI-powered suite of tools that video call app developers can tap into.

NVIDIA Maxine powers a range of features including resolution upscaling and background noise removal. It can adjust your camera’s focus to place you in the center of the frame, reorientate your face and add virtual backgrounds. You can also have an AI avatar replace your face on calls, while Maxine offers real-time closed captioning and translation through NVIDIA Jarvis.

The company says Maxine’s video compression can reduce the bandwidth needed for calls by 90 percent versus H.264 compression. As such, video calls could vacuum up much less of your data in the near future.

Maxine uses NVIDIA Tensor Core GPU acceleration and it runs in the cloud. So, you won’t exactly need one of NVIDIA’s latest graphics cards to harness these features if your video calling app of choice enables them. They should work on any device.

Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet have some of these features already, but tapping into the Maxine platform could help them improve those functions. AI developers, startups, its software partners and makes of video calling apps can now apply for early access to Maxine.