Runway Characters – Real-time Avatars from Runway

Runway Characters – Real-time Avatars from Runway Unexpectedly, the team decided to venture into the niche of real-time assistants. I just got to test it. Under the hood, their new world model GWM-1 is officially stated, although it feels like there is some fast LLM and diffusion working with a lot of real-time video hacks on top. The quality is indeed quite good, although it seems that this is not pure generation - at the end of the phrase, there is a cut, and the character switches to a basic silence animation, plus the eyes in photorealism slightly drift due to distillation. Interestingly, there is a lot of room for customization. Unlike other similar solutions, creating an avatar requires only one picture (we suspiciously look towards ActTwo). You can also choose a voice, set a custom prompt, and most importantly - connect your knowledge base for integration, for example, to a website. You can try it out yourself, they give a generous 30 minutes of conversation for testing - such generosity we have not seen from Runway before. Demo