A Bay Area AI startup says it has built a video avatar convincing enough that about half the people who talked to it didn't realize it was a machine.

Tavus unveiled its new model, Griffin, on Oct. 1 and calls it a "Human Interaction Model," built to understand and generate face-to-face conversation in real time, including facial expressions, pauses and voice, not just words. The company says a test version, Griffin-Lite, was mistaken for a real person by 26 of 54 participants, or 48%, after a one-minute video call.

How the test worked

According to Tavus's research page, participants were told they would be matched with another participant for a one-minute video chat about what they were looking forward to this year. Their partner was actually an AI character whose face, voice and responses were generated live. Only at the end of a follow-up survey were people asked whether it had crossed their mind that their partner might not be human. Everyone was then told the truth.

Tavus ran the same setup on its previous system and says just 1 of 41 people, about 2.4%, believed that avatar was a person. People who guessed "human" were about 79% confident on average, the company said, and those who guessed "AI" were about 81% confident.

The fine print

Tavus calls the result the first pass of a "real-time video Turing test," but it isn't the classic version of that test, in which a judge knowingly compares a hidden human and a hidden machine. Decrypt pointed out that nobody on these calls was warned a bot might be on the other end. The sample was small, the calls were short, and the study was run by the company itself rather than an outside lab.

Tavus is also holding Griffin back. It says Griffin-Lite is a research preview limited to selected testers while it works on disclosure features and other safety steps, because the same realism that makes the model useful could make it deceptive.

Why it matters

Tavus, which went through Y Combinator and is backed by Sequoia Capital and CRV, sells AI video characters that developers can plug into apps. Realistic avatars like these are already being pitched for job interviews, customer service and tutoring. For anyone who does video calls for work, the results are a sign that "Is this a real person?" may soon be a fair question to ask.