Convai

Convai is a conversational AI platform for creating interactive AI characters, NPCs, virtual humans, and embodied AI agents. It is designed primarily for games, virtual worlds, XR experiences, simulations, websites, mobile applications, and other environments where an AI character needs to communicate naturally while also perceiving and responding to its surroundings. Convai combines conversational AI with voice, vision, memory, animation, and actions so that characters can behave as interactive participants rather than simple text chatbots.

The company was founded in 2022 by Purnendu Mukherjee and Prashant Mishra. Convai’s development grew from research and work around embodied AI and 3D spatial intelligence, with the company focusing on bringing conversational and agentic AI into virtual environments.

A central part of Convai is its AI character creation system. Developers can define a character’s backstory, personality, knowledge, role, objectives, language, voice, and behavior. The platform also supports narrative design and actions, allowing characters to participate in more structured interactive experiences.

Convai’s multimodal perception capabilities allow characters to interpret aspects of their environment. Through vision capabilities, an AI character can perceive information from a webcam or virtual environment and use that information during interactions. This makes the platform particularly relevant to games and XR applications where an AI character needs awareness of the surrounding scene.

The platform also provides a Knowledge Bank, where developers can upload documents and other information that can be used to ground a character’s responses. This is useful when an AI character needs to answer questions about a particular game world, training scenario, product, organization, or other defined knowledge base.

Long-term memory allows characters on eligible plans to retain information and context between sessions. This can make conversations more continuous and useful for applications where an AI character needs to remember previous interactions.

Convai also supports real-time voice interactions. Its conversational pipeline incorporates speech recognition, language-model processing, and text-to-speech, while the platform can add lip synchronization, facial animation, and body animation to embodied characters.

For visual characters, Convai provides high-quality lip synchronization and embodied animations. Developers can use existing animation sets or create custom animations using Convai’s XR animation tools. Characters can also perform more complex actions through sequences of animations.

Another important capability is multilingual support. Convai’s current website advertises support for 65+ languages and 500+ voices. Its documentation also lists specific supported languages including Arabic, Cantonese Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Convai can be used through no-code creation tools as well as developer SDKs and APIs. The Convai Playground allows creators to build and test characters, while Avatar Studio and Convai Sim provide browser-based environments for creating interactive experiences without requiring traditional game-development workflows.

For developers, Convai provides integrations with Unity, Unreal Engine, and web technologies. Its web integrations include Web SDK capabilities and plugins for technologies such as Three.js, React, PlayCanvas, and Babylon.js.

The Unity SDK is designed for adding conversational AI characters to games and virtual worlds. It supports natural dialogue, intelligent NPC behavior, voice interaction, and integration with the Unity development workflow.

The Unreal Engine integration provides conversational AI, voice interaction, and environment-aware capabilities. Convai offers both marketplace/plugin installation and source-based installation options, although some newer Unreal functionality is identified as beta in its documentation.

Convai also supports modding frameworks, allowing developers to add Convai-powered AI functionality to existing games and environments. Its documentation describes SDK-based access to character responses and actions for supported modding workflows.

The platform is designed to be device and platform agnostic, with applications spanning websites, mobile applications, video games, virtual reality, augmented reality, kiosks, and physical-world experiences.

Convai identifies several major application areas. Learning and training is one of them, where conversational AI characters can act as interactive instructors or role-play participants. The platform is also positioned for brand representatives, enabling AI-powered virtual representatives to answer questions about products, services, or organizations. Social virtual worlds and gaming represent another major use case, with AI characters serving as companions, NPCs, guides, and interactive participants.

Convai also provides conversation evaluation and assessment on its higher-tier plans. This can help teams analyze conversations and assess the quality and performance of AI-character interactions.

For enterprise deployments, Convai offers capabilities such as data ownership and control, security and compliance options, service-level agreements, priority support, custom data integration, and on-premises deployment. Enterprise deployments can therefore be separated from the standard developer infrastructure.

Pricing is based on a combination of subscription tiers and interaction quotas. The current plans are Free, Indie Dev, Professional, Scale, Business, and Enterprise. Included quotas vary substantially between tiers, making the platform suitable for experimentation as well as larger production deployments.

The current Free plan costs $0/month and provides 100 interactions per month, 60 minutes of cloud-rendered Avatar Studio and Convai Sim usage, and one character-session concurrency. The Indie Dev plan costs $29/month, while the Professional plan costs $99/month.

Scale is currently listed at $499/month, Business at $1,199/month, and Enterprise uses custom pricing. Annual billing currently displays discounted prices of $22, $69, $299, and $499 respectively for Indie Dev, Professional, Scale, and Business. The Business annual price is also marked as a limited-time offer, so these figures can change.

The platform’s interaction quotas are important when evaluating its cost. For example, the Free plan includes 100 interactions per month, while Indie Dev includes 3,000, Professional includes 10,000, Scale includes 50,000, and Business includes 125,000. Unused interactions do not roll over into the next billing cycle.

Convai also separates certain usage into specific limits. Flagship LLMs such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro have interaction caps depending on the plan, while high-quality third-party voices such as ElevenLabs also have plan-specific interaction limits.

Overall, Convai is best suited to developers, game studios, XR creators, simulation providers, educators, and organizations building interactive AI characters. Its strongest differentiator is the combination of conversational AI with spatial perception, voice, memory, animation, and actions, allowing AI characters to operate inside interactive environments rather than existing only as text-based assistants.

Pricing

Convai uses a freemium subscription model with usage quotas. The current official pricing page lists Free at $0/month, Indie Dev at $29/month, Professional at $99/month, Scale at $499/month, Business at $1,199/month, and Enterprise with custom pricing.

Review

Convai is a strong option for developers who need interactive, embodied AI characters rather than conventional chatbots. Its combination of conversational AI, vision, voice, memory, actions, animation, and game-engine integrations gives it a clear focus in gaming, XR, simulations, and virtual environments.

Its Unity and Unreal integrations are particularly useful because developers can bring conversational AI directly into existing 3D environments. Web support also makes it possible to deploy experiences outside traditional games.

The platform’s no-code tools provide an entry point for creators, while APIs and SDKs give developers deeper control. Enterprise customers can also access on-premises deployment and additional security and support capabilities.

The main limitation is pricing complexity at higher usage. Interaction quotas, flagship-model limits, third-party voice limits, active-user limits, and concurrency restrictions all need to be considered when planning a production deployment.