RealChar. - Your Realtime AI Character

🎙️🤖Create, customize and talk to your AI Character/Companion in realtime🎙️🤖

✨ Demo

Try our site at RealChar.ai

Demo 1 - with AI Elon about cage fight!

elon-edit-camera.mp4

Demo 2 - with AI Raiden about AI and "real" memory

raiden.mp4

Demo settings: Web, GPT4, ElevenLabs with voice clone, Chroma, Google Speech to Text

🎯 Key Features

• Easy to use: No coding required to create your own AI character.
• Customizable: You can customize your AI character's personality, background, and even voice
• Realtime: Talk to or message your AI character in realtime
• Multi-Platform: You can talk to your AI character on web, terminal and mobile(Yes. we open source our mobile app)
• Most up-to-date AI: We use the most up-to-date AI technology to power your AI character, including OpenAI, Anthropic Claude 2, Chroma, Whisper, ElevenLabs, etc.
• Modular: You can easily swap out different modules to customize your flow. Less opinionated, more flexible. Great project to start your AI Engineering journey.

🔬 Tech stack

• ✅Web: Vanilla JS, WebSockets
• ✅Mobile: Swift, WebSockets
• ✅Backend: FastAPI, SQLite, Docker
• ✅Data Ingestion: LlamaIndex, Chroma
• ✅LLM Orchestration: LangChain, Chroma
• ✅LLM: OpenAI GPT3.5/4, Anthropic Claude 2
• ✅Speech to Text: Local Whisper, OpenAI Whisper API, Google Speech to Text
• ✅Text to Speech: ElevenLabs
• ✅Voice Clone: ElevenLabs

📚 Comparison with existing products

👨‍🚀 Prerequisites

Before you begin setting up this project, please ensure you have completed the following tasks:

0. Setup Tutorial

• Tutorial - YouTuBe

1. LLM - OpenAI API Token

👇click me

This application utilizes the OpenAI API to access its powerful language model capabilities. In order to use the OpenAI API, you will need to obtain an API token.

To get your OpenAI API token, follow these steps:

1. Go to the OpenAI website and sign up for an account if you haven't already.
2. Once you're logged in, navigate to the API keys page.
3. Generate a new API key by clicking on the "Create API Key" button.
4. Copy the API key and store it safely.
5. Add the API key to your environment variable, e.g. export OPENAI_API_KEY=<your API key>

(Optional) To use Azure OpenAI API instead, refer to the following section:

1. Set API type export OPENAI_API_TYPE=azure

If you want to use the earlier version 2023-03-15-preview:

export OPENAI_API_VERSION=2023-03-15-preview

2. To set the base URL for your Azure OpenAI resource. You can find this in the Azure portal under your Azure OpenAI resource.

export OPENAI_API_BASE=https://your-base-url.openai.azure.com

3. To set the OpenAI model deployment name for your Azure OpenAI resource.

export OPENAI_API_MODEL_DEPLOYMENT_NAME=gpt-35-turbo-16k

4. To set the OpenAIEmbeddings model deployment name for your Azure OpenAI resource.

export OPENAI_API_EMBEDDING_DEPLOYMENT_NAME=text-embedding-ada-002

1.1 (Optional) Prepare LLM - Anthropic(Claude 2) API Token

👇click me

To get your Anthropic API token, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Anthropic website and sign up for an account if you haven't already.
2. Once you're logged in, navigate to the API keys page.
3. Generate a new API key by clicking on the "Create Key" button.
4. Copy the API key and store it safely.
5. Add the API key to your environment variable, e.g. export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=<your API key>

2. (Optional) Prepare Speech to Text - Google Cloud API

👇click me

To get your Google Cloud API credentials.json, follow these steps:

1. Go to the GCP website and sign up for an account if you haven't already.
2. Follow the guide to create a project and enable Speech to Text API
3. Put google_credentials.json in the root folder of this project. Check GCP website
4. Change SPEECH_TO_TEXT_USE to use GOOGLE in your .env file

3. Prepare Text to Speech - ElevenLabs API Key

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1. Creating an ElevenLabs Account Visit [ElevenLabs](https://beta.elevenlabs.io/) to create an account. You'll need this to access the text to speech and voice cloning features.

2. In your Profile Setting, you can get an API Key. Save it in a safe place.

3. Set API key in your .env file:

ELEVEN_LABS_API_KEY=<api key>

💿 Installation via Python

• Step 1. Clone the repo

  git clone https://github.com/Shaunwei/RealChar.git && cd RealChar

• Step 2. Install requirements
  • Install portaudio and ffmpeg for audio

  # for mac
  brew install portaudio
  brew install ffmpeg

  # for ubuntu
  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install portaudio19-dev
  sudo apt install ffmpeg

  • Then install all python requirements

  pip install -r requirements.txt

• Step 3. Create an empty sqlite database if you have not done so before

  sqlite3 test.db "VACUUM;"

• Step 4. Run db upgrade

  alembic upgrade head

• Step 5. Setup .env: update API keys and select module

  cp .env.example .env

• Step 6. Run server with cli.py or use uvicorn directly

  python cli.py run-uvicorn
  # or
  uvicorn realtime_ai_character.main:app

• Step 7. Run client:
  • Use GPT4 for better conversation and Wear headphone for best audio(avoid echo)
  • There are two ways to access the web client:
    • Option 1: Open your web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8000 (NOT 0.0.0.0:8000)
    • Option 2: Running the client in React.

      cd client/web
      npm start

      After running these commands, a local development server will start, and your default web browser will open a new tab/window pointing to this server (usually http://localhost:3000).
  • (Optional) Terminal client: Run the following command in your terminal

  python client/cli.py

  • (Optional) mobile client: open client/mobile/ios/rac/rac.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj in Xcode and run the app
• Step 8. Select one character to talk to, then start talking

(Optional) 📀 Installation via Docker

👇click me

1. Docker image: you can use our docker image directly

   docker pull shaunly/real_char:latest

   (Or you want build yourself) Build docker image

   python cli.py docker-build

   If you have issues with docker (especially on a non-Linux machine), please refer to https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/ (installation) and https://docs.docker.com/desktop/troubleshoot/overview/ (troubleshooting).

2. Run docker image with .env file

   python cli.py docker-run

3. Go to http://localhost:8000 (NOT 0.0.0.0:8000) to start talking or use terminal client

   python client/cli.py

🆕! LangSmith integration

👇click me

If you have access to LangSmith, you can edit these environment variables to enable:

LANGCHAIN_TRACING_V2=false # default off
LANGCHAIN_ENDPOINT=https://api.smith.langchain.com
LANGCHAIN_API_KEY=YOUR_LANGCHAIN_API_KEY
LANGCHAIN_PROJECT=YOUR_LANGCHAIN_PROJECT

And it should work out of the box.

⭐️ Star History

📍 Roadmap

• Launch v0.0.0 and build a community
• Add more characters
• Move away from Vanilla JS
• Launch mobile app
• Add authentication

🫶 Contribute to RealChar

Please check out our Contribution Guide!

🎲 Community

• Join us on Discord