Meta's Muse Realtime Avatar turns any image into a talking AI character

Meta introduced Muse Realtime Avatar, an audio-driven Diffusion Transformer that turns reference images into expressive, interactive avatars with synchronized facial, hand, and full-body movement during live conversation. It shares Muse Realtime Voice's speech-token stream for synchronization, uses distillation to cut inference from 120 to 2 neural function evaluations per chunk (a 60x reduction), and streams 448x768 portrait video at 25 fps with roughly 870 ms latency. Meta says raters preferred it over Runway Characters and HeyGen LiveAvatar overall and across every evaluated dimension, and it embeds Meta Video Seal watermarks without added latency.