Two doors.
Know which one you want.
You do not want a stock avatar off a shelf. You want an agent that belongs to your business. There are two different ways in, and knowing which is which saves you an hour. This walks both, step by step, and is straight about where each one is gated.
A character, or a working agent.
| The character studio | The creation stitch | |
|---|---|---|
| You get | A character — a face with a personality, as a portable file | A complete working agent — face, presence, voice, instructions and capabilities |
| Account needed? | No. No account, no meter | Yes — sign-in, a verified email address and completed onboarding |
| Best for | Trying it, making a face, getting a file | Actually putting an agent to work |
Most people should try the studio first, because it costs nothing and takes a minute. Do the stitch when you want a real agent.
One agent, created whole.
This surface exists to solve a specific problem: agents used to be assembled in pieces, and pieces went missing. It creates “face, presence tier, instruction set, capabilities, manifest-ready” in one coherent pass. Five steps, in the studio’s own words.
“Who is your agent?”
“Name it, say what it does — that’s all the flow needs to begin.”
“Give it a face”
“Pick a ready-made face (wears the Hybrid tier) or generate one from the name (wears SVG) — every face previews live, free, and you can change the tier in step 3.”
“How does it show up?”
“Choose the presence tier and the voice — watch the preview change.”
“What can it do?”
“The instruction set is its operating manual; capabilities are its hands.”
“Review & create”
“Manifest-ready means nothing the platform needs is missing — one honest checklist, then create.” You tick one box — “I’ve reviewed the checklist” — and create.
A card reading “your agent’s name is ready.”, with the line: “Face, presence, voice, instructions, and capabilities — all created together. Nothing the platform needs is missing.” You can expand it to see the actual record identifiers that were written.
When something you have chosen will not work, the stitch tells you in words instead of quietly giving you something lesser. The service says so about itself repeatedly: choices are “refused here with words, never silently downgraded”, and “a closed gate says so, it never silently downgrades.”
Concretely: it refuses a voice identifier of the wrong shape rather than renaming it to something that would pass, and refuses a 3D model reference that is a bare id or points off-site rather than mounting nothing.
A face in a minute, no account.
The fast way in. Four ready-made characters sit at the top under QUICK START — Professional Guide · Clever Fox · Small Dragon · Service Robot — and picking one jumps you to the end with everything filled in. The studio’s own note: “pick one — it’s alive in under a minute, the full wizard stays for the curious.”
The full way is eight panels: what you are creating · how to start · the character structure · visual styles · customise · preview live states · choose the seal engine · save and use. Nothing is permanent — panel one says “Pick a starting point — everything stays changeable.”
“I confirm that I own this image or have permission to use the person, animal, mascot, artwork, or character shown.”
“I understand this preview analyzes the image locally in my browser only; it is not uploaded or stored, and metadata is discarded.”
The entire studio page contains no upload machinery — no fetch, no
XMLHttpRequest, no FormData anywhere in the file. Your image is
read by the browser’s own file reader and drawn locally.
One footnote so the promise is not oversold: the page does load a usage-analytics script and records events such as which starter you clicked. Your image is not sent anywhere. Anonymous usage events are. Photos, transcripts, message content and audio are excluded from analytics by policy.
Where the studio is honest about its limits.
Six engines are offered, and the studio says plainly which two it cannot make.
| Engine | Can the studio make it? | Its own words |
|---|---|---|
| FULL RENDER · SVG | Yes | “The classic exit — your character as a coherent humanoid design.” |
| TERMINAL · ASCII | Yes | “A glyph portrait with an open face zone the live face rides.” |
| SKETCH LINE | Yes | “Your palette as chalk-line colors.” |
| KINETIC TYPE | Yes | “Two colors and your name — spoken words become the mouth.” |
| HYBRID PHOTO | No — made elsewhere | “Seals in the face overlay lab — the wizard authors no hybrid base image.” |
| LIVE 3D · VRM | No — wear only | “Wear-only type: the estate can wear a live-vrm package and cannot make one.” |
NetShow Alive can display a full-body 3D character, but there is no way to create one here. The engineering record agrees — no live record uses the 3D type at all. Photo-based Hybrid characters are made in the Face Overlay Lab, a crew preview that asks for a crew password. So four of the five character types can be made by anyone right now; the photo-based one needs us.
One file: your-name.alive.json — self-contained, so a photo-based character
carries its own image; capped at 20 MB; wearable by any
<netshow-alive> tag. It is sealed with a sha-256 fingerprint, so an
altered copy of a sealed file is refused whole rather than half-drawn — though a file
carrying no fingerprint at all is accepted rather than refused, an outcome the code calls
“accept-with-honesty.”
The last panel also hands you the snippet for your own website, under a heading reading ADD TO WEBSITE — EMBED, with a copy button — the snippet explained in Put an agent on your site.
What is proven, and the one thing that is not.
The character studio is open
It answered HTTP 200 on 2026-08-10 and needs no account.
The creation stitch has merged
It was finished on a working branch and recorded as not-yet-merged in the 2026-08-10 status report; the merge has since happened and is verified present in the repository’s main line. We note the sequence rather than pretending the document and the code always agreed.
The first-time paying-customer path
A brand-new customer has not yet been taken all the way through the stitch on a live paid account — the build lane proved the flow, but the only usable test identity was a QA user. Making an agent is proven. That last mile is not yet walked.
Start with the free door.
Four of the five character types, no account, about a minute.