LiveAvatar Overview

Programmable interfaces that give a human touch to your AI Agents

AI agents: Start here for a structured overview of all available documentation.

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What can you build?

LiveAvatars support real-world applications including:

• Real-time product demos or virtual sales assistants
• AI-powered support or training agents
• Interactive hosts, tutors, or characters

The core component — the LiveAvatar Session — manages streaming user input, feeding responses through language models, and rendering synchronized speech and video.

Two development paths

LiveAvatar offers two modes to match your architecture needs:

FULL Mode

LiveAvatar manages ASR, LLM, TTS, and WebRTC. You configure and ship.

LITE Mode

Bring your own AI stack. LiveAvatar handles real-time video streaming.

Choosing a mode

	FULL Mode	LITE Mode
WebRTC	Managed by LiveAvatar	You manage
ASR / STT	Managed by LiveAvatar	You provide
LLM	Managed (or bring your own)	You provide
TTS	Managed (or bring your own)	You provide
Best for	Ship fast, less infra	Full control, existing pipelines
Credits	2 per minute	1 per minute

Quickstart

Get your first LiveAvatar conversation running in 4 steps.

1. Get your API key

   Sign up at app.liveavatar.com and grab your API key from the developers page.

2. Create a session token

   Generate a session token on your backend server. This defines the session configuration and acts as a short-lived access token.

   curl -X POST https://api.liveavatar.com/v1/sessions/token \
     -H "X-API-KEY: <YOUR_API_KEY>" \
     -H "accept: application/json" \
     -H "content-type: application/json" \
     -d '{
       "mode": "FULL",
       "avatar_id": "<avatar_id>",
       "avatar_persona": {
         "voice_id": "<voice_id>",
         "context_id": "<context_id>",
         "language": "en"
       }
     }'
   

   The response returns a session_id and session_token.

3. Start the session

   curl -X POST https://api.liveavatar.com/v1/sessions/start \
     -H "accept: application/json" \
     -H "authorization: Bearer <session_token>"
   

   The response returns a LiveKit room URL and room token.

4. Join the LiveKit room

   For a quick test, navigate directly to the LiveKit URL in your browser:

   https://meet.livekit.io/custom?liveKitUrl=<livekit_url>&token=<livekit_client_token>
   

   Once verified, build a custom integration using the SDK:

   • GitHub: liveavatar-web-sdk
   • NPM: @heygen/liveavatar-web-sdk

   Use your backend server to create session tokens and start sessions. Pass the LiveKit credentials to your frontend for the user-facing experience.

Resources

Sandbox Mode

Test without consuming credits.

Web SDK

Official JavaScript SDK.

Migration Guide

Moving from HeyGen Interactive Avatar.