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
Launched this week
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
@chrismessina Thanks Chris, we rreally are excited on giving this to developers and end users. Theoretcially? You can now generate enldess avatar content at $0. Exciting times!)
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 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
@ansari_adin
On 300ms: it's not generation time. Generation actually takes 80-90ms depending on GPU model. The 300ms is the model-side pipeline latency that comes from audio context buffering — you need to look ahead at a chunk of audio before producing a lip-synced frame, which is fundamental for any audio-driven avatar. Doesn't include the latency of wherever the avatar's speech is coming from (STT-LLM-TTS pipelines or speech-to-speech models) or the time required to deliver frames over the network to the viewer. Add those in and true E2E depends on the setup, location, and network conditions. Our results match or exceed proprietary competitors, and we're open sourcing the model and code anyway. Try the online demo and judge for yourself. On 9x — that was against an offline non-realtime generator, so it's more "real-time vs not" than a clean like-for-like baseline.
Remy AI
Tried the demo, looks impressive. Why have you decided to open source your model?
Yolk
@artyom_zhuravlev Thanks! The reason is simple, open source moves faster, and growing the entire market wiht more developers coming in. We want to move fast and we believe the market can be 10X bigger then it is today, but for that you need also a good model. As soon as we saw the benchmark results and how user engage with it we realized this is the first model that can deliver this promise, so we want to spread it as fast as possible. Note that we also released our streamer so our competitors can use it for better streaming, the entire industry needs to jump over a certain quality bar to be good enough - > We are helping this happen today.
Love this! I am working on a project to enable voice as primary interface for agents doing real work would love to integrate with AVATURN! Tried using with Tavus before but too pricey, how can we scale this to multiple users any tips on the same? Love the project and initiative, congrats on the launch!
Avaturn Live
@rampradeep_dodda You will need some code to manage stream lifecycles. We plan to release it as well later. And, you're going to need some autoscaling configuration and a fleet of GPUs running with some over provisioned capacity, so that your users will get the avatars in a reasonable time.
Or you can just use our managed API already available.
Avaturn Live
@apcarpl Our goal isn’t to trick people into thinking they’re talking to a real human. It’s to make AI conversations feel more natural, emotionally responsive, and engaging.
Congrats on this amazing release! I’ve been in the real time Avatar business for the past 20 years. My first real time Avatar engine, a desktop windows app called Virtual Assistant Denise was released in 2008, and finding out you’re open sourcing your framework is just a unbelievable good news taking in consideration the high quality and competitiveness of your engine. You may be right now disrupting a very competitive market, where most big players will have to review their pricing. I have great respect for all those current Avatar companies as I’ve worked with most of them and know their very skilled people and their effort to stay competitive, and I do understand their efforts and investments to stay alive. But on the other hand, they need to go back in time and observe what companies like Unreal did to survive when Unity came up and disrupted the game market. Thanks to that, today we have small group of people releasing amazing games! Congrats again on this intrepid move, as developers can now focus on the creation of the final product, and not on finding ways to pay for subscriptions. TTS, STT, LLMs, memory and database frameworks were until a few time ago in the hands of a few companies and today they became commodities. Your decision to open source this engine is one big step to democratize this important piece of software to build human machine interactive product possible for everyone.
Avaturn Live
@guile_lindroth Thank you so much! We are excited to see where this will go with our model available to everyone!