What your agent is
made of.
An agent that answers correctly but sits there like a form field does not feel like anyone. This is the part that makes it feel like someone: the character types, how faces are made, the twelve states it moves through, how it speaks — and what is genuinely working today versus built and switched off.
Five engines, not five colour schemes.
| Type | What it actually is |
|---|---|
| SVG | A drawn character — “a coherent humanoid design, worn by the one-tag element today.” |
| ASCII | A text-art portrait with an open face zone the live face rides in. |
| Sketch Line | A chalk-line drawing in your palette. |
| Hybrid | A photo-based face, built from a portrait you supply. |
| Kinetic Typography | “Two colors and your name — spoken words become the mouth.” |
A Kinetic Typography character has no face in the usual sense. The words are the mouth.
NetShow Alive can wear a full-body 3D character but cannot make one. The studio says so in its own engine list — “Wear-only type: the estate can wear a live-vrm package and cannot make one” — and the engineering record confirms no live record uses the 3D type at all. Full-body 3D also does not travel to your own website in the current embed version.
Four you can make yourself. One needs us.
SVG, ASCII, Sketch Line and Kinetic Typography are all marked open in the studio’s engine list — you can make them right now, with no account.
The photo-based Hybrid is made in a different room. The studio does not author it: “Seals in the face overlay lab — the wizard authors no hybrid base image.” That lab is a crew preview today and asks for a crew password. If you want a photo-based character, that is a conversation with us, not a self-service button.
It is analysed in your own browser. We verified that rather than repeating it: the
studio page contains no upload machinery at all — no fetch, no
XMLHttpRequest, no FormData anywhere in the file.
Create your own agent covers this in detail.
Twelve states, each with its own body language.
Your character does not have one idle animation and one talking animation. It has twelve distinct states, and they track what the agent is genuinely doing. These are the canonical twelve, with the product’s own descriptions.
| State | What the character does |
|---|---|
| Idle | Breathing, blinking, present |
| Listening | Leans in and tracks the speaker |
| Thinking | A visible reasoning beat |
| Speaking | Viseme mouth plus beat gestures |
| Interrupted | Yields instantly, hands up |
| Emphasis | Lands the key point |
| Tool Use | Shows its work on a panel |
| Waiting for Approval | Asks before acting |
| Confident | High-certainty posture |
| Uncertain | Shrugs and flags low confidence |
| Success | Celebrates completion |
| Error | Owns the failure, visibly |
They are a promise about character, not animation. Waiting for Approval means the agent stops and asks before it acts. Uncertain means it shows you when it is not sure instead of bluffing confidently. Error means it owns a failure visibly rather than going quiet.
A product that ships an “Uncertain” posture is a product that expects to be uncertain sometimes — which is the honest expectation to have.
A conversation, not a recital.
- It greets you out loud, face first. Tap the pill in the corner and it starts talking.
- You can interrupt it — “by talking over it, typing, or tapping the orb.”
- You never have to speak. Typing works without a microphone, it still answers out loud, and captions are always on.
- Your microphone stays off until you start a call, and the browser asks permission then and only then.
- The mouth follows the actual audio — mouth shapes run against the live sound rather than flapping on a timer.
The product is deliberately built so you bring your own model and voice provider: “Any model, any voice, no keys here” and “No key ever touches our servers.” You pay those providers directly.
One qualification. Where a business has no key of its own on file, the live relay resolves one server-side — “business vault key wins, platform key under demo mode.” A provider key never reaches a visitor’s browser either way.
Voice on the Alive site itself is live and you can use it today. For an agent embedded on someone else’s website, the voice path has been verified at every checkpoint of the connection — but no billed audio call has yet been made from a customer’s own site. Text conversation off-origin is proven and running on two real domains.
A small sealed record — and no secrets in it.
We can be concrete, because fourteen real agent records were exported and we read all of them. Each carries its identity, instructions, model policy and a governance block.
- Every single one of the fourteen records
secretsEmbedded: false— no credentials are baked into the agent record. - Thirteen are business tenants — solar pumps, pool services, a cafe, an inspection firm and more — built as working agents with a profile and instruction set each.
- Eleven of the thirteen are queued for the public shelf; two are lane-test fixtures held back on the principle that “test fixtures are not inventory.”
Every one of the fourteen reads deployment.status: draft, and every tenant
was deliberately seeded not-public until a decision is taken. Real, provable, and waiting —
not live to strangers. Nor are they for sale: the publishing command sets no price at all,
so tenants would list as browse-and-use, never as purchases.
The richer body performance is waiting on a decision.
A substantial amount of expressive capability — body movement, the clip layer, motion identity at full range, and lip-sync — is fully built and served, and deliberately switched off behind flags pending sign-off.
“The behaviour is complete and running on the stage, but it has no switch of its own yet, so it is off unless a developer arms it… We would rather write that down than let you find it by turning a knob that does nothing.”
The flat character types carry their own idle life, but not the deeper rest and speak-up behaviours, which are 3D-stage features.
So: what you get today is a character with twelve genuine states, live voice, a synced mouth and its own idle life. What is waiting behind a switch is the richer body performance.
Now go make one.
Four of the five types take about a minute, with no account.