RealChar

RealChar lets you create AI companions with their own personalities and hold live voice or text conversations. It's for people who want to shape a character and host the app themselves while using external AI services for replies.

• Custom characters: Define a character's personality, background and voice without writing code; voice cloning uses ElevenLabs and requires an account with that service.
• Voice and text chat: Talk or type to characters through a browser, terminal or iOS client, with spoken replies from Edge TTS, ElevenLabs or Google Text-to-Speech.
• Local speech recognition: Transcribe speech on your own hardware with faster-whisper or WhisperX using a CPU or NVIDIA GPU, or use OpenAI Whisper API or Google Speech-to-Text for cloud transcription.
• Model choice: Generate replies through ReByte, OpenAI GPT models, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic Claude or Llama 2 hosted through Anyscale.
• Phone conversations: Receive calls from characters through Twilio; this requires a Twilio account and supports US phone numbers with ElevenLabs voices.

RealChar is open source under the MIT license and can run locally or on a self-hosted server using Docker. A hosted demo is also available at RealChar.ai. Self-hosting doesn't make conversations fully offline: the language model providers require internet access and API credentials, and receive the text used to generate replies. Local speech recognition keeps transcription on your hardware; cloud speech services process audio or text externally.