Field notes from the studio.
On realtime characters, the craft of presence, and the agentic pipelines that write and translate this very blog.
August 21, 2026 · 10 min · research · engineering · agents
Live avatars in 2026: a field guide to the research
How real-time avatars became possible: the distillation recipe behind streaming video generation, the listening-head turn, full-duplex voice, and what the 2026 literature says is still hard.
August 21, 2026 · 7 min · engineering · api
The Core Mechanics of a Realtime AI Avatar Generator API: From Image to Embodiment
Explore how a realtime AI avatar generator API turns a portrait into a conversational character, with session integration, timing measurements and usage costs.
August 20, 2026 · 4 min · api · pricing
LiveAvatar API billing: credits, conversation modes, and total cost
Understand LiveAvatar FULL versus LITE credit units, then compare subscription allowances and complete conversation costs with Realtime Avatar.
June 11, 2026 · 6 min · api · pricing
Realtime avatar API pricing: included minutes, overage, and total cost
Calculate live-avatar API costs from monthly minutes and concurrency. Catalog-derived plan prices, worked examples, and an interactive calculator with explicit assumptions.
June 10, 2026 · 6 min · engineering · agents · i18n
Agentic localization: how this blog stays multilingual without a translation team
Every post on this blog can ship in English, Chinese, and Japanese. The translators are LLM agents; the editors are pull requests. Here's the pipeline.
June 10, 2026 · 6 min · product · api
Looking for a HeyGen alternative? Decide what you're actually replacing first
A developer's guide to choosing a HeyGen alternative in 2026: video-generation platforms vs realtime avatar APIs, what each costs per minute, and when each one wins.
June 10, 2026 · 7 min · api · product
HeyGen API pricing explained (2026): video credits, the LiveAvatar split, and the realtime math
What HeyGen's API actually costs in 2026 — per-second video rates, the LiveAvatar realtime spin-off, credit conversions — and how the math changes for live conversational avatars.
June 10, 2026 · 7 min · engineering · content
Payload CMS vs. a git-based blog: what we chose for an agent-written site
We researched running Payload 3 on Cloudflare Workers + D1, weighed it against keeping content in the repo, and picked the stack AI agents are best at maintaining.
June 10, 2026 · 6 min · product · api
Synthesia pricing in 2026 — and the alternatives when you need more than rendered video
Synthesia's plans, what the API actually includes, and the alternative paths — D-ID, HeyGen, and realtime avatar APIs — when your use case is interactive rather than rendered.
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