I had a great discussion with a Virt-A-Mate character (Patreon)

Voxta: An AI Virt-A-Mate Companion

Hi everyone! As I’ve said before, I’ve been exploring different ways to bring AI into Virt-A-Mate. For a while, I contributed to Agnaistic (which is great by the way), but it became clear my own goals were not close enough to theirs for me to achieve what I wanted. So I started experimenting on my own AI chat system, specially built for Virt-A-Mate and real-time speech.

Guys… it was amazing.

But even though I was super excited to share what I was doing, there were many pieces missing from the puzzle. I needed animations, a voice to show things and help to experiment with LLMs and prototypes.

Reign and Lapiro were also doing experiments on their own. And then, everything clicked into place. With good content, the lifeless avatar suddenly came to life.

So the question was, how can we distribute it? The simplest and healthiest way to go was to make a new Patreon dedicated to this project. This means people have an easy way to get everything they need to have a great experience, and clearly shows whether people actually want something like that. And this also means we’ll be able to work as a team, pushing this outside of Virt-A-Mate, and into a day-to-day friend, not one to help you get stuff done, one to just chat with… unrestricted.

Now, I’m sure all of you who contributed to keeping me invested in the Virt-A-Mate community may wonder what this means for the other projects such as Timeline, Embody, etc. The good news is that it won’t have much of an impact, since the time I have to work on Virt-A-Mate has always been limited to the time when I am alone (which doesn’t happen often enough), but I can work on Voxta during breaks since it’s much easier to work on even if people can peek at my screen! All existing patrons at the time of this post will get access to the first build, as a big thank you for being there for me. If you want to encourage this project and other people working on this, please subscribe to the Voxta Patreon (I'll share the link as soon as it's up). Note that Voxta is powered by Timeline, Glance and Scripter as well as a new AI companion backend, Voxta, which will ultimately be open source :D

I’m really excited about this thing! Please let me know what you think of our strategy and the project in the comments! And yes, I also have a new Timeline build coming which I hope will solve some of the outstanding issues you’ve told me about!

You can check out some early videos Reign is sharing in this thread: https://hub.virtamate.com/threads/voxta-fully-autonomous-ai-girlfriend-for-vam.37344/post-121911

(Did I tell you I was excited?)