Human-like AI avatars you can talk to instantly. Avatars that responds faster then you blink with natural speech and active listening. They smile, emote, and react like real people. Now OPEN SOURCE.
This is the 2nd launch from Avaturn Live. View more
AVTR-1 Real-Time Open Weights Model
Launching today
The best real-time avatar model in the world is now open source with open weights. Take the model, tweak it, and use it at $0 cost. What's unique: our model listens while you speak — full-duplex; the avatar reacts in real-time, with minimal latency. • Every frame is generated, avoiding annoying animation loops from pre-rendered playback. • Full streaming infrastructure included so you can get started right away.
Free
Launch Team / Built With
Raycast
Tried the demo before launch — the lip sync is noticeably better than what I’ve seen with other generative avatars. But @sergei_sherman walked me through something deeper: active listening coupled with empathetic response.
You know how you can kind of say anything to most AI avatars (e.g. “my mom died”, or "omg there's a murderer outside my window!") and they'll just blink, cycle their idle loop, nod and say something like “oh, that’s nice to hear.” These bots are just mouths on a timer with zero semantic read.
AVTR-1 generates every pixel of the face in real time, frame by frame. When meaning shifts in what you’re saying, the expression shifts to match — e.g. brow lifting at word three because the content warranted it, not just because the sentence ended.
For developers: there’s no Pipecat equivalent for video agents right now. @Avaturn Live is shipping the full stack — model weights, streamer, sync layer, reference avatars. Bring your own GPU, and you're ready in 15 minutes. Open weights is a big deal, and it's all free if your business is under $10M ARR.
Yolk
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I'm Sergei Sherman, CEO of @Avaturn.
Today we're releasing AVTR-1 — an open-weights real-time AI avatar model that sets a new state of the art on key benchmarks.
If you're building anything with real-time AI avatars, AVTR-1 is for you.
✍️ Here's what makes AVTR-1 different:
The whole face is generated. Not just the lips swapped onto a pre-recorded clip. Every pixel of the avatar's face, top of the head to the chin, is generated in real time, frame by frame.
Native duplex — the avatar actively listens. The model is generating all the time, whether the avatar is speaking or listening. Just like a human on a call, the avatar's face responds to your words and your tone in real time. The brow lifts at word three because you sounded surprised at word three, not after the sentence ends.
For three years, "real-time avatars" have meant pre-recorded video with a generated mouth pasted on top. We threw out the recording.
🎯 Why you want AVTR-1:
Open weights. Free for personal, research, and any commercial use under $10M in annual revenue. Commercial licensing above that, through us.
Sub-200ms end-to-end on one A100 or 4060. Runs on youd device in a data center, in the cloud.
Avaturn Streamer included — the open infrastructure layer for real-time avatars. Accepts AVTR-1 or any other open-weight real-time video model as a drop-in. Plug in your video model on one side, your conversation backend on the other.
Reference avatars out of the box. Model cards, license-cleared, deployable today.
Launch-partner examples in the repo with Cartesia and Pipecat on day one.
🏗️ One thing we're explicitly NOT launching — and want the industry to build with us:
A public, vendor-neutral leaderboard for real-time AI avatars. The category needs a transparent scoreboard, one the ecosystem runs together. Clear, public competition is the only way improvement happens fast.
We're inviting every other vendor, every open-source contributor, every researcher to help us build it.
🎉 Everything is live today:
Code, inference, evaluation: github.com/avaturn-live/avtr-1
Download Model Weights huggingface.co/avaturn-live/avtr-1
Technical report, full paper, reproducible benchmarks: avtr-1.avaturn.live
Hosted demo: avaturn.live
Real-time generated video is the next frontier. Every previous wave — text, then real-time audio — produced an open layer the category built on. We're shipping that layer today: model and orchestration both.
Drop questions, feedback, or what you're building below — I'll be here all day 🚀
— Sergei
the active listening part is what separates this from every other avatar tool. current ones just talk at you with dead eyes while you wait. if the expression matching actually works in real time this changes how you build AI sales and onboarding flows
Avaturn Live
@tina_chhabra Thanks Tina! Yes, this is our differentiator, thanks for commenting on this!
the 9x faster claim is interesting but faster than what exactly. the baseline matters a lot here. sub-300ms felt like magic two years ago and now it's table stakes for anything calling itself real-time. curious what the actual latency numbers look like end to end, not just the generation side
Avaturn Live
Hey guys! We are so excited to show you our new model: avatars became even more realistic and reactive. The awesome thing is that active listening is now at another level: avatars are reacting to your speech like a real person. If you are not a technical person like me, you can simply go to our website and talk to our avatars to see how cool that is! If you are a developer yourself, check out our github: we opened our model!