Hedra Launches Live Avatars With LiveKit, Delivering Real-Time AI Characters At Ultra-Low Latency And Cost

In Brief

Hedra has launched Live Avatars, a real-time AI-driven avatar solution developed with LiveKit, offering lifelike digital characters for use across media, education, customer service, and gaming at a cost-efficient price point.

Multimodal artificial intelligence platform Hedra has introduced a new offering called Hedra Live Avatars, developed in partnership with LiveKit, an open-source framework for real-time media application development. This joint initiative presents what is positioned as one of the most advanced streaming avatar models currently available.

LiveKit, which is based on the WebRTC protocol, provides infrastructure for scalable and low-latency transmission of video, audio, and data. This makes it suitable for real-time digital communication across a wide range of applications.

Hedra Live Avatars enable the creation of digital characters capable of participating in live, two-way interactions. The technology supports use cases in several sectors. In the content production and social media space, it can be used to generate virtual hosts or animated personas for platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, offering an alternative to traditional video production methods at a lower cost. In commercial and marketing contexts, companies can implement AI-driven brand representatives or customer support avatars, combining facial animation and movement tracking to deliver realistic engagement.

The educational and training sectors can also leverage these avatars to facilitate interactive lessons with lifelike instructor avatars that use natural gestures and facial expressions to support better knowledge retention. For gaming and virtual reality, the platform’s flexible rendering capabilities allow for the efficient generation of non-player characters in various visual styles, streamlining the development process for immersive environments.

Why Hedra Live Avatars Are Setting A New Standard In Real-Time AI Animation

Utilizing the global infrastructure provided by LiveKit, Hedra Live Avatars can operate with latency under 100 milliseconds, enabling real-time responsiveness essential for live broadcasts, remote meetings, and digital learning environments.

Hedra’s system integrates with major large language models and text-to-speech technologies, including those developed by Google and OpenAI. This compatibility allows users to configure custom avatars using different voice and language tools to meet varied communication requirements.

The platform also supports multiple aesthetic formats, ranging from realistic human likenesses to stylized or artistic designs, all of which can be created from a single static image. This broad range of output options is intended to meet diverse creative and professional needs.

At a rate of five cents per minute, the service is priced to be more accessible than many comparable alternatives. The model is designed to reduce the cost of deploying sophisticated AI-driven avatars, making it a viable solution for both small-scale users and larger organizations.

Hedra is a technology platform driven by artificial intelligence that facilitates the creation of detailed and expressive digital avatars. These avatars can represent human characters, animals, or stylized forms, generated by merging a single uploaded image with synthesized speech. At the core of the system is the proprietary Character‑3 omnimodal model, which unifies video, audio, movement, and emotional expression into a single framework. This allows the platform to generate synchronized speech and motion in natural language, producing lifelike talking avatars without the need for customized or industry-specific configurations.