Convai AI

Background and Achievements:

Convai emerged from deep expertise in real-time conversational AI, founded by a former NVIDIA engineer who worked on the core speech and language technologies that make natural, low-latency conversation with virtual characters possible. Since then, Convai has grown into one of the most widely used platforms for embodied AI characters, and is the highest-rated generative AI plugin on both the Unreal Engine Marketplace and the Unity Asset Store. The platform is used by enterprises, developers, and educational institutions across hospitality, retail, industrial training, healthcare simulation, and gaming — spanning everything from physical kiosk deployments in customer-facing spaces to large-scale simulation training for safety procedures and customer interactions. Convai has been featured in NVIDIA keynotes and industry showcases as a leading example of interactive AI characters in real-time 3D.

Challenges to be addressed by AR:

The biggest gap in enterprise AR today is interaction. AR has become effective at overlaying the right information at the right moment, but the interface for engaging with that information remains largely manual — menus, gestures, and pre-scripted flows. Convai sees three challenges the industry needs to solve together: first, making natural language a reliable, hands-free interface for headworn and spatial deployments, where workers often cannot use touch controls; second, grounding AI agents in an organization’s actual documentation and procedures so their guidance is accurate and trustworthy in high-stakes environments; and third, establishing practical standards for how autonomous agents should behave, escalate, and hand off in a work context. These are ecosystem-level problems that no single vendor can define alone.

Why AR is a strategic area:

Convai’s thesis is that AR and conversational AI converge into a single interface layer. Everywhere our virtual humans are deployed — kiosks, showroom floors, training simulations, virtual worlds — the pattern is the same: people want to talk to the system in front of them, and the system needs to see and understand the environment to respond usefully. Headworn and spatial computing is where this becomes most powerful, because the AI character shares the user’s physical context. As enterprises move AR from visualization toward interaction, conversational and agentic AI becomes the natural control layer for those deployments. Joining the AREA lets Convai learn from members running large-scale enterprise AR programs and contribute what we’ve learned about making AI characters reliable, grounded, and safe in work environments