Splatchat

Splatchat started as a learning exercise. A few people on the Adwave team had been poking at real-time AI avatars as a possible direction for video, and the conversations kept pulling me in. I wanted to actually understand how the pieces fit together, not just nod along in meetings, so I picked a small project to build alongside the reading.

The project was: what if the person on the other end of a video call wasn’t human?

The fastest way to learn something is to ship it, so I kept going. The exercise turned into a working prototype, the prototype turned into something I wanted other people to try, and eventually it turned into Splatchat.

The product is a video chat platform where the person on the other end of the call is an AI character. The avatars look at you, react, and speak in real time, instead of feeling like a chatbot with a face glued on. You can pick from a roster of characters or create your own by uploading a photo, choosing a voice, and writing a personality; a quick-create flow gets you a working avatar in about two minutes. Characters remember past conversations, so the next call picks up where the last one left off. They can see too, through your camera or your screen, when you let them.

The use cases turned out to be broader than I expected. Characters can join your actual meetings, on Google Meet, Zoom, or Teams, as a visible participant with a face, take notes, and deliver a summary or follow-ups afterward. Connect them to the tools you already use, Slack, Gmail, Notion, GitHub, Linear, your CRM, and they can do real work during a conversation: draft the email, file the ticket, pull up the doc. They can take phone calls. They can host live broadcasts. You can embed one on your own website. Or you can just talk. A friend, a coworker, a thinking partner, whatever you need them to be.

One flow I didn’t predict people would want as much as they do: cloning yourself. Your face, your voice, your knowledge, attending the meeting you couldn’t make.

For developers there’s a full API and an MCP server, so you can put a face on your own agents, or drive characters, meetings, calls, and broadcasts from code.

The “learn it” project ended up being more interesting than the thing I was supposed to be learning it for.

Try it: splatchat.com

Part of A Product a Month.