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Tips & Tricks

, we hosted Toby Sinclair of Real Talk Studio and Alec Lindsey, HeyGen API Product Manager. You can watch the 

 of the session if you missed it or want to revisit some of the Q&A at the end!

There were a few questions we were not able to get to live. Alec has written up answers to these questions and we are sharing them here! For additional resources, check out the 

, where you can ask technical questions. 

HeyGen Interactive Avatar Q&A follow-up from February 13, 2025 Webinar

Q: Looking for specific details on how to build this out for someone who isn't technical. I'd like to use this for interactive sales role plays.

A: Use Realtalk Studio to set up a sales role play demo with the features Toby has built out to enable non-technical users to create custom role plays! 

Q: do you have an external knowledge base linked to your AI avatars?

A: Yes, totally possible, just use the SDK!

Will it be possible to have more influence on the LLM model in the future, for example to have the choice between OpenAI or Anthropic?

Q: I'm interested in real time avatars for an interactive role play / gaming experience. Does HeyGen's platform support "game triggers" similar to what Inworld does? Use case is a 20 questions game.

A: No game triggers available in HeyGen today, you can probably achieve the same thing with the OpenAI Assistant API

I would like to use interactive avatars but connected to my IA backend. Not LLM as OpenAI, Backend with my own AI code (LlamaIndex, etc) and connected to my private data (My own RAG)

A: Yes, totally possible, just use our SDK!

Q: Will you make the 4o model available for the interactive avatar in heygen labs?

A: We don't plan to right now because it is too slow - it wouldn’t be a good experience for the real-time conversation. 

I think a quality leap is achieved if the avatar is very pressing towards the user, without asking questions. Instead it always seems to be there waiting for a question. How can this be done?

A: You can prompt it to do this, and send ‘tasks’ with the SDK as needed.

Q: Can we integrate a custom GPT, not open ai assistant?

A: Custom GPTs aren’t accessible via API as far as I know.

Q: What about customer service example? Can you load a RAG based architecture with customer content to be able to have internal customer questions to be handled by the avatar?

Yes, use the SDK and OpenAI Assistant with RAG, you can do this. Need to probably have the avatar say some filler words while the RAG is looking up the customer’s data as that would take a few seconds.

How do you handle custom pronunciation correctly with interactive avatars? Seems like the tools are not the same as in the main editor.

A: We have it on our roadmap to add Brand Voice from HeyGen to the Interactive Avatar / Streaming API.

Q: Is this possible to create interactive avatars the same way we can create AI avatars using a set of images or by prompting?

Q: Can you switch the interactive avatar in the middle of a session, or do you need to do a new session? not following how to show other emotions in the same session

A: You will need to do a new session unfortunately.

Q: Is there a limit to our knowledge library? I just got a prospect/demo regarding a persona that has hundreds of hours of content that we want to transcrive and create our library. What are the limits? 

A: You can do this with RAG, however in my experience that would be overkill and you won’t need that much data to create a compelling persona.

Q: What is the cost for an app builder like Toby to use the HeyGen avatar? How is the rate structure?

 - it is $1 for every 10 minutes of speech at the Scale plan.

Q: Currently I integrate ElevenLabs for the voice clone as the Heygen doesn't seem to quite be there. How long will it be before you bring yours up to speed in affect and usability?

A: We are always improving our voices! And we also use ElevenLabs for our voice clones, so it should be comparable!

Q: Do we need to use another provider like Eleven Labs for voice, or does HeyGen offer natural voice capabilities as well?

Q: Could Interactive Avatars work in other languages?

A: Yes, you can use HeyGen Interactive Avatars in languages other than English

Interactive Avatar Q&A - Follow up from 2/13 Webinar

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