AIRI is a free, open-source, self-hosted AI companion โ a “container of souls” for virtual characters inspired by AI VTubers like Neuro-sama. The project has earned more than 50,000 stars on GitHub and is under very active development, with its latest updates in 2026. Unlike cloud companions, AIRI runs on your own machines, so the character, its voice and its memory belong to you.
AIRI brings a character to life across web, macOS and Windows with realtime voice conversation, Live2D and VRM avatars, and the ability to actually do things: it can play Minecraft and Factorio alongside you, react to what happens, and hold ongoing conversations through a pipeline of speech recognition, large language models and text-to-speech. The architecture is modular, so you can swap models and providers, connect different voices and extend the character with new capabilities. It is equal parts companion, VTuber toolkit and open playground for digital-life research. Developers can add new abilities as modules, from extra game integrations to custom dialogue and perception behavior.
AIRI is free and open source under the MIT license. Running it costs nothing beyond your own hardware and any API keys you choose to plug in for models or cloud voices; local models can keep even that at zero.
AIRI is for VTuber fans, streamers and open-source enthusiasts who want their own AI companion or on-stream character โ and for developers exploring realtime, embodied AI characters that live on the desktop rather than in someone else’s cloud.