AI company bitHuman has announced a visual SDK for creating avatars for use as chat agents, instructors, virtual coaches, companions, and experts in different fields.
According to the company, the SDK allows avatars to be created on Arm-based and x86 systems without a GPU. The avatars have a small footprint and can be run online or offline on devices like Chromebooks, Mac Minis, and Raspberry Pis.
Because of their small footprint, these characters can be brought to a wide range of environments, including classrooms, kiosks, mobile apps, or edge devices.
“Running AI in the cloud can be a challenge in certain scenarios due to privacy, latency or cost,” said Parag Beeraka, senior director of consumer computing at Arm. “bitHuman’s SDK takes full advantage of Arm’s CPU performance and widespread adoption to deliver rich, responsive avatars, showing how on-device AI is unlocking new, immersive user experiences.”
The SDK can also be used with the LiveKit plugin so that developers can add custom voices to their avatars by uploading audio samples or using prebuilt voice profiles. The plugin also makes it easy to deploy the avatars into existing apps with just a few lines of code.
Avatars can be self-hosted or run on bitHuman’s cloud API. Both methods offer latency of less than 100 ms for more lifelike interactions, bitHuman says.
