lcolucci

I don't think that's the primary purpose of realistic interactive avatars, any more than deception is the purpose of CGI. Deception requires intent to mislead — if users know they're talking to an avatar, it's not deception no matter how realistic. Just as moviegoers aren't "deceived" by CGI. It's an experience they opt into.

As for benefits: language learning with avatars, scalable corporate training, accessible education for kids, personalized coaching, and certainly entertainment, which has real value too.

Thank you!

Do you think the same about text that is indistinguishable from human-written text (LLM chatbots)? Or voice that is indistinguishable from a human talking?

Illegal things, like fraud and impersonation, are illegal. There's a difference between the tool and the actions people do with the tool.

There are tons of useful applications of interactive avatars - from corporate training to kids education to language learning and more. Plus, why would you want to stop this little guy from existing in the world? :) https://lemonslice.com/try/alien

This is so obvious now that you say it (* facepalm *). We definitely need to give the LLM context on the appearance (both from the initial image as well as any /imagine updates during the call). Thanks for pointing it out!

Can you help us make him? What's the right voice? https://lemonslice.com/hn

That's super nice of you to say. Thank you!

This is good feedback thanks! The "not patient" feeling probably comes from our VAD being set to "eager mode" so that the latency is better. VAD (i.e. deciding when the human has actually stopped talking) is a tough problem in all of voice AI. It basically adds latency to whatever your pipeline's base latency is. Speech2Speech models are better at this.

Well put - and thanks, we'll keep building. Still chasing this level of magic: https://youtu.be/gL5PgvFvi8A?si=I__VSDqkXBdBTVvB&t=173 Not to mention language tutors, training experiences, and more.

Good idea. We need to do that. I'm also excited to push the /imagine stuff further and have B-roll interspersed with the talking (like a documentary) or even follow the character around as they move (like a video game)

The curve is accelerating!

Thank you so much!

whoops I actually did set that on purpose. I guess I like watching things sped up and assumed others did too :) But you can change it.

Thank you! And the cool thing is it's actually a full video world model. We'll expose more of those capabilities soon

That's a good one. I would suggest asking them to integrate with LiveKit. Then it'll be really easy to combine InWorld and LemonSlice.

So cool! I love how he sometimes looks down and over his glasses

I wonder if we should make the UI a more common interface (e.g. "the call is ringing") to avoid this confusion?

It's a normal mp4 video that's looping initially (the "welcome message") and then as soon as you send the bot a message, we connect you to a GPU and the call becomes interactive. Connecting to the GPU takes about 10s.

Thank you so much! It's been a lot of fun to build

This is a good point on audio. Our main priority so far has been reducing latency. In service of that, we were deep in the process of integrating Hume's two-way S2S voice model instead of ElevenLabs. But then we realized that ElevenLabs had made their STT-LLM-TTS pipeline way faster in the past month and left it at that. See our measurements here (they're super interesting): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18kq2JKAsSahJ6yn5IJ9g...

But, to your point, there are many benefits of two-way S2S voice beyond just speed.

Using our LiveKit integration you can use LemonSlice with any voice provider you like. The current S2S providers LiveKit offers include OpenAI, Gemini, and Grok and I'm sure they'll add Personaplex soon.

Thanks Dan! The HN playground let's anyone try out for free without login

Qwen is the default but you can pick any LLM in the web app (though not the HN playground)

what's not working for you?

This comment made my day! So happy you're liking it

haha thank you so much! The team is incredible - small but mighty

Agreed. We were so excited about the results last year and they are SO BAD now by comparison. Hopefully we'll say the same thing again in the couple months

Sorry about the confusion. Video Agents and Creative Studio are two entirely different products. Video Agents = interactive video. Creative Studio = make a video and download it. If you're interested in real-time video calls, then Video Agents is the only pricing and feature set you should look at.

https://lemonslice.com/hn - There's a button for "Get 1st month free" in the Developer Quickstart

Wow thank you so much :) We're so proud of it!!

Yes this is exactly right. Using the LiveKit integration you can add LemonSlice as an avatar layer on top of any voice provider

Thanks so much! We're super proud of it

Yes we do! Within the web app, there's a "action text prompt" section that allows you to control the overall actions of the character (e.g. "a fox talking with lots of arm motions"). We'll soon expose this in the API so you can control the characters movements dynamically (e.g. "now wave your hand")