Quick story on this:
While building our AI companion Platform, one of the biggest focuses were Video Calls.
Since Majority of our clients were game Studios, we were lucky to be able to collaborate with talented artists providing Rigged 3d Models for custom Video Call experiences.
This was ver viable for client based work, but not a self service platform.
We did in parallel, we did many experiments with Stitching opensource models , streaming content and caching and looping video generations to mimic a video call experience.
We were not funded and still are not so we couldnt really afford to burn through tokens, we tried to be very "scrooch" with our approach.
We saw some early results with a closed group and the feedback and the impression was always positive, there was something magical about not only hearing your favourite character, but also seeing them while having a conversation.
However we quickly find out that it's just too expensive for a consumer use case but i do believe there is a huge opportunity here and as the models get better, more squashed to cut down cost (shoutout to Pruna for example) , this is going to be a very exciting field for Character IP holders
The cost is insane here.
$0.50 per minute. That’s $30 an hour.
An outsourced human call center worker costs about $0.017 a minute (roughly $1.02/hour).
You’re paying a 30x premium to talk to an AI Agent.
Everything seems good till it isn't.