I got tired of keeping a Telegram tab open all day just to talk to my local agent, so I built a monitor-resident avatar that fronts it instead — a video-call-style face that performs the replies instead of me reading a wall of text.
A few things that might interest this crowd:
No runtime GPU for the avatar. Instead of live-animating a face, the agent’s reply carries inline emotion-beat tags — [], [] deploy?, [] — and a player selects and blends between ~30 pre-rendered clips. The GPU stays 100% on the model. Code and logs render as chat cards instead of being read aloud, and [] pops a human-in-the-loop approve/cancel that blocks the agent until you answer.
It hooks into a real agent as a connector. The agent’s gateway dials out to a local WebSocket the app hosts, so from the agent’s side the avatar is just “another channel,” indistinguishable from a messenger. Adapters for Hermes and OpenClaw are included, plus a demo mode that runs with zero setup.
Local voice both ways. Edge TTS out (swappable to Qwen3-TTS / MeloTTS / Piper), Silero VAD + faster-whisper in.
Open-core, MIT. The engine is fully usable on its own: drop in a folder of clips named by emotion, point it at your agent. Avatars are pure-data bundles — no code runs when you install one — so you can build your own. The repo ships the engine only; there’s no bundled character.
The engine just plays video clips — it doesn’t care what produced the pixels. So the avatar can be photoreal, 2D anime, a 3D render, pixel art, anything. You can even use a Live2D or VRM model: pre-render its expressions into clips and it becomes a Ghost Vessel preset. A Live2D shell can’t do the reverse — it can’t take live-action footage. Clips are a superset. The trade-off is that you give up real-time rig interactivity (no dragging the head around) and you pay a one-time render step.
Repo + 45s demo: https://github.com/ghdtjrtka/ghost-vessel
The part I’d most like feedback on is the emotion-beat output format — the contract that turns model text into a UI performance. Has anyone here tried similar output contracts to drive an interface from LLM output? Curious what broke on your setup, and whether smaller local models keep the tags straight.
Circling back since you called it: the NOTICE file is gone. Everything in the repo is MIT now — engine, tools, docs, and the bundled starter avatar — and the README says that in one line instead of three places contradicting each other.
The carve-out only ever existed because the photoreal avatar is a commissioned likeness I can’t relicense, and that one isn’t in the repo anyway. So it’s named where it’s sold rather than sitting in a legal side-file scaring people off the code. Thanks for pushing on it.
Awesome. Great work 👍