RealChar

RealChar is an open-source project for creating, customizing and talking to AI characters in real time, with natural voice conversation across mobile, web and terminal. It has gathered about 6,200 stars on GitHub, is released under the MIT license, and was last updated in early 2026.

Overview

RealChar packages the whole realtime companion stack into one codebase. Speech is transcribed with OpenAI’s Whisper, a large language model such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4 or Claude generates the character’s replies, Chroma provides vector-database memory so characters can remember context, and ElevenLabs text-to-speech voices the responses for a seamless spoken conversation. You can define custom characters with their own personalities and backstories, then talk to them hands-free as if on a call, or interact through text interfaces when voice is not convenient.

Key Features

• Create and customize AI characters with distinct personalities
• Real-time voice conversation with low-latency spoken replies
• Whisper speech-to-text and ElevenLabs text-to-speech pipeline
• Pluggable LLM backends including GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and Claude
• Chroma vector database for character memory and context
• Clients for mobile, web and terminal in one codebase
• MIT-licensed open source, self-hostable end to end

💳 Pricing

RealChar is free and open source under the MIT license. Running it may incur costs from the third-party APIs it connects to, such as OpenAI or ElevenLabs, depending on which providers you configure.

Who Is It For

RealChar is for developers and hobbyists who want to build their own realtime AI companions or voice characters, and for anyone prototyping conversational character experiences without stitching the pipeline together from scratch.