@voqalize/avatar 0.2.2 → 0.4.0

package/README.md

@@ -1,75 +1,58 @@
-# Avatar — a programmable 2-D talking head
+# @voqalize/avatar
 
-A dependency-free SVG avatar for AI agents on voice calls. The agent can wear
-any face and go by any name — the demos call theirs Kiran. The server owns
-meaning (what state the agent is in, what it's saying, where it's looking); the
-client owns motion (how a face actually moves when it means those things).
+A 2-D talking head for AI voice calls, driven by your pipecat client. The
+avatars are lip-synced to the audio and they are state aware: they know when
+they have been interrupted, when the user is talking versus idle, when a tool
+call has started and stopped.
 
-No build step, no runtime dependencies, ~270KB of ES modules — a third of that
-is the three face rigs, and a host that ships one face pays for one.
+No video track, no per-minute avatar vendor, no second media path. Twelve
+avatars ship with it — three SVG faces, six professional Canvas2D identities and
+three 2.5-D characters — one per entry point, so you pay for the one you import,
+and you can author your own.
 
-The two load-bearing interfaces are specified in
-[docs/contract-protocol.md](docs/contract-protocol.md) (server ↔ widget) and
-[docs/contract-avatar.md](docs/contract-avatar.md) (mixer ↔ face).
+This is the browser half. The pipeline half is
+[`voqalize-avatar`](https://pypi.org/project/voqalize-avatar/) on PyPI; they are
+two ends of one wire format and release independently, kept compatible by the
+wire contract rather than a shared version number
+([RELEASING.md § Compatibility](https://github.com/voqalize/avatar/blob/main/RELEASING.md#compatibility)).
 
-```sh
-npm install @voqalize/avatar      # the browser half
-pip install voqalize-avatar       # the pipecat half
-```
+**Licence: MIT for the code, CC-BY 4.0 for the three 2.5-D character binaries**
+(`assets/*.glb`, the artwork — see `assets/README.md` for the credit line). The
+code is usable anywhere, including in closed-source products; the characters ask
+for attribution and nothing else. The manifest declares the pair as
+`MIT AND CC-BY-4.0`.
 
-```jsx
-import { Avatar } from '@voqalize/avatar';
-
-<Avatar client={pipecatClient} className="call-tile" />
-```
+## Install
 
-```python
-from voqalize_avatar import AvatarProcessor
-
-pipeline = Pipeline([..., tts, AvatarProcessor(), transport.output()])
+```sh
+npm install @voqalize/avatar      # this package, the browser half
+pip install voqalize-avatar       # the pipecat half
 ```
 
-That is the integration, both halves of it. The processor infers the agent's
-state from the frames already flowing past it and streams viseme letters synced
-to the audio; the component renders a face that listens, thinks, claims the
-floor, speaks and yields it. Nothing to configure, no binaries to install.
-
-Under that one component is a ~30-channel parameter mixer with a full driving
-API (`setState`, `interject`, `gesture`, `speak`, `perform`, …). It is not an
-npm entrypoint — one component is the whole public surface, deliberately, and
-[docs/removed.md](docs/removed.md) says what that cost and how to undo it. The
-rest of this README documents that machinery, because it is what you read when
-you are authoring a face or debugging a mouth.
+Node 20+. The package is ESM with **no runtime dependencies** and ships its own
+types. `@pipecat-ai/client-js` (`>=1.4 <2`) and React (`>=18`) are declared as
+*optional* peers: the pipecat import is types-only, so nothing fails to load
+without it, and React is only for `@voqalize/avatar/react`.
 
-## What's in the box
+## Getting started
 
-The repo is one system in three pieces, because that is how it gets consumed —
-a browser widget alone is not a working avatar, and neither is a lipsync
-backend. See [docs/design-library-split.md](docs/design-library-split.md) for
-why this is a library rather than a product.
+In the browser, wherever your app already renders the bot's tile:
 
-| piece | where | what it is |
-|---|---|---|
-| the widget | `src/` | the face. Dependency-free ES modules, no build step, mounts anywhere. Internal since 0.2 |
-| the client | `client/` → `@voqalize/avatar` | the dispatcher (turn clock, cue splice) and the `<Avatar>` component over it |
-| the backend | `py/` → `voqalize-avatar` (PyPI) | a pipecat `FrameProcessor` that infers state from stock frames and streams visemes |
-| the aligner | `native/avatarsync/` | the Rhubarb Lip Sync fork the backend drives — A–H letters from text *and* from audio |
+```js
+import { createAvatar } from '@voqalize/avatar';
 
-Browser side, one entry point:
+const avatar = createAvatar({ mount: el, client: pipecatClient });
+```
 
 ```jsx
-import { Avatar } from '@voqalize/avatar';    // peers: react >= 18, @pipecat-ai/client-js
+import { Avatar } from '@voqalize/avatar/react';
+import { wren } from '@voqalize/avatar/faces/wren';   // `peep` is the default
 
-<Avatar client={pipecatClient} avatar="peep" className="call-tile" />
+<Avatar client={pipecatClient} options={{ face: wren }} className="call-tile" />
 ```
 
-`client` is the live `PipecatClient` (or `null` before connect); `avatar` picks
-a face and is read once, at mount. Everything else is forwarded to the mount
-`<div>`, so it sizes and styles like the tile it lives in. There is nothing to
-configure because the server already says all of it.
-
-Server side, the whole integration is one processor between your TTS and your
-output transport — see `py/` and `docs/contract-protocol.md`:
+In the pipeline, between the TTS service and the transport's output — the seat
+where it can see the audio that is about to be spoken, at generation speed:
 
 ```python
 from voqalize_avatar import AvatarProcessor
@@ -77,651 +60,197 @@ from voqalize_avatar import AvatarProcessor
 pipeline = Pipeline([..., tts, AvatarProcessor(), transport.output()])
 ```
 
-It takes no arguments. `StartFrame` tells it the sample rate, the aligner rides
-inside the wheel, and an application that needs to say something the pipeline
-cannot infer subclasses `AvatarStateMachine` — see `py/README.md`.
-
-That much is inferred from stock pipecat frames, with no application code.
-States that depend on what your application is *doing* — a tool call that
-should read as *reviewing the screen* rather than *thinking* — are signalled
-explicitly with `AvatarControlFrame`.
-
-## Running the demo
-
-ES modules will not load over `file://`. Serve the directory:
-
-```
-python3 serve.py 8777
-open http://localhost:8777/demo/call.html
-```
-
-Use `serve.py`, not `python3 -m http.server`. The stdlib server sends
-`Last-Modified` and no `Cache-Control`, so browsers apply heuristic freshness and
-quietly stop revalidating modules you have edited; `serve.py` is the same server
-with `Cache-Control: no-store`. Do not work around a stale module with a `?v=`
-query string either — that puts two copies of it in the graph and fails worse.
-
-`demo/call.html` is the page to start with: a two-tile call with mic VAD,
-turn-taking and a log of every token the server would have sent. Hold `Space` to
-be the human side of the call if you have no microphone.
-
-The other one is the control harness:
-
-```
-index.html?avatar=NAME           every control maps to a server token; exposes
-                                 window.avatar, so the console is a live REPL
-```
-
-Those two are the entry points. Everything else is rig tooling — for the
-occasions when you are *building or repairing an avatar*, which is a different
-job — and it lives behind one index:
-
-```
-demo/rig/index.html              rig-check, contact sheet, torso check, clip strip,
-                                 expression lab, lipsync eval
-```
-
-`?avatar=NAME` (or `?face=NAME` on the rig pages) selects the rig; the call
-demo also has a live picker that swaps it without dropping the call.
-
----
-
-## Design
-
-### 1. The face is a vector, not a set of drawings
-
-Everything the avatar can do is a point in a ~30-dimensional parameter space
-(`src/params.js`): `mouthOpen`, `mouthRound`, `lidL`, `browInnerR`, `headYaw`,
-and so on. Visemes, emotions, gaze poses and gesture keyframes are all just
-named vectors in that space.
-
-This is the decision the rest of the system rests on. Blending a smile into a
-mid-sentence "oh" is arithmetic, not SVG path surgery — and a continuous stream
-of parameter updates from the server is the *native* input format rather than
-something to be adapted to.
-
-### 2. Layers mix in a fixed order
-
-```
-base pose (state + emotion)  →  gaze  →  visemes  →  clip deltas  →  idle
-```
-
-Earlier layers are overwritten by later ones on the channels they touch. Gesture
-clips and the idle layer are **additive**, so they compose instead of fighting:
-a nod during speech moves the head while the mouth stays on the server's viseme
-track, with no special-casing anywhere.
-
-One hard rule: **while the server viseme track is playing it owns the mouth
-outright.** An interjection that fires mid-sentence contributes its head and
-brows, and its mouth track is silently dropped. Otherwise the avatar appears to
-say two things at once.
-
-### 3. Smoothing is the animation
-
-There is no tweening engine. Every channel chases its target with a
-frame-rate-independent exponential approach, at a per-channel time constant:
-
-| channel group | τ | why |
-|---|---|---|
-| mouth | 42ms | fast enough to hit consonants, slow enough to blur between them |
-| lids | 18ms | blinks must be crisp or they read as a glitch |
-| pupils | 32ms | saccades are ballistic |
-| brows | 80ms | |
-| head | 160ms | the head has real mass |
-| smile | 130ms | expressions bloom, they don't snap |
-| shoulders | 190ms | the torso has more mass than the head and reads wrong when it hasn't |
-| lean | 240ms | |
-
-This gives the face weight, and it does **viseme co-articulation for free** — we
-never blend shapes explicitly, we just retarget and let the mouth chase.
-
-### 4. Screen-share hygiene
-
-The call runs with screen share on. All idle motion is deliberately
-low-amplitude and low-frequency; a jittery avatar in the corner of a shared
-screen costs the video encoder real bitrate for no communicative gain.
-
----
-
-## The viseme protocol
-
-The wire format is the **Rhubarb Lip Sync alphabet** — A–H plus X — a
-condensation of the Preston Blair mouth set. Nine shapes is plenty for a
-stylized 2-D face, and it means the server has an obvious open-source reference
-implementation to target.
-
-| letter | mouth | phonemes |
-|---|---|---|
-| `A` | closed lips | P B M — also the resting closure |
-| `B` | slightly open, teeth together | K S T D, consonantal EE |
-| `C` | open | EH AE |
-| `D` | wide open | AA |
-| `E` | slightly rounded | AO ER R |
-| `F` | puckered | UW OW W |
-| `G` | lower lip to upper teeth | F V |
-| `H` | tongue up, visible | L |
-| `X` | idle / silence | — |
-
-A cue is `{ t, v, i? }`:
-
-```js
-{ t: 240, v: 'D', i: 0.8 }
-//  ^ms into the utterance
-//         ^letter
-//                  ^optional 0..1 loudness
+That is the integration, both halves of it. Neither takes an argument.
+`createAvatar` returns `{ destroy() }` and nothing else — the avatar is an
+embodiment of your `PipecatClient` and reacts to it, so there is no avatar to
+drive and no state to read back.
+
+**Works the same with or without `@pipecat-ai/voice-ui-kit`.** All `createAvatar`
+needs is the `PipecatClient` instance — however you built your call UI, if you
+have that instance you can mount an avatar next to it. voice-ui-kit's
+components (buttons, visualizers, transport controls) are chrome around the
+same client; they neither wrap nor gate it.
+
+## What you get for free
+
+Most of the avatar works on any pipecat application without customization — not
+because integrations were enumerated, but because the behaviour is derived from
+frames and events a pipecat pipeline already emits. `SPEAKING`, `LISTENING`,
+`MUTED`, `OFFLINE` and `DEGRADED` come from your `PipecatClient` with no backend
+involvement at all; `THINKING`, `WORKING` and `CANT_HEAR` come from
+`AvatarProcessor` watching turn boundaries, LLM response boundaries and
+function-call frames; lipsync comes from the same karaoke frames pipecat already
+pushes for word-level captions; blink, breath, gaze aversion and idle motion are
+always the renderer's.
+
+What is left over is small, specific, and each item is a case the library
+refuses to guess at — a deliberate nod or greeting, a tool whose calls never
+enter your pipeline, a pose richer than the nine states, a backend that is not
+ours. [The architecture
+page](https://github.com/voqalize/avatar/blob/main/docs/architecture.md) is the
+canonical reference for all of it.
+
+## The wire protocol
+
+Three commands, one envelope
+([contract-wire.md](https://github.com/voqalize/avatar/blob/main/docs/contract-wire.md)):
+
+```json
+{ "type": "avatar", "cmd": "state",  "state": "WORKING" }
+{ "type": "avatar", "cmd": "action", "id": "ACKNOWLEDGE" }
+{ "type": "avatar", "cmd": "cues",   "ctx": "tts-context", "from_ms": 0, "cues": [] }
 ```
 
-**Send intensity if you can.** It's cheap to derive from TTS energy and it's the
-single biggest realism win available — the same viseme shouted and murmured
-should not look identical. It scales only the effortful channels, so a quiet `D`
-is a small `D`, not a different shape.
+**States are durable and they are prioritised.** A state holds until the facts
+change; it does not complete on a timer. **The state pipecat reports always
+wins** — bot-output lifecycle and user speech are observed Pipecat facts, and a
+state the server sends is a *candidate* underneath them. **Actions are
+point-in-time animations** that land on top of whatever state is effective at
+the time; they are finite, they complete on their own, and they never establish
+state.
 
-### Sync rules (these matter more than the shapes)
+Emission is overwrite, never merge: a `cues` message says "discard everything
+queued at or after `from_ms`, then append these". The server decides; the client
+has no say and no way to refuse.
 
-- **Schedule against the audio clock, never wall time.** `audioEl.currentTime *
-  1000` or `AudioContext.currentTime`. Wall time drifts against playback and you
-  will spend the rest of your life chasing it. The client does this for you if
-  you pass `audio` to `speak()`.
-- **The mouth leads the sound by 40ms** (`LEAD_MS`). Perceptual tolerance is
-  asymmetric — roughly −45ms (audio first) to +125ms (video first) — so leading
-  is the safe side to err on.
-- **Cues below 30ms are dropped** by `normalizeCues()`, which also sorts and
-  merges consecutive repeats. When a sub-30ms cue must be dropped, closures
-  (`A`/`G`) win over mid-open vowels: they carry more lip-reading information.
-- **Streaming is fine.** Start with what you have and `pushCues()` the rest as it
-  arrives; the track re-normalizes and re-seeks.
+**Not using our backend?** Any server can produce cues, three ways, best first.
+If your TTS emits native viseme events, map the integer ids through
+`AZURE_VISEME_TO_LETTER` and ship `{t, v}` as they stream. Otherwise force-align
+the text against the audio and map ARPAbet through `ARPABET_TO_VISEME`. With no
+server work at all, `textToCues(text)` is a crude grapheme guesser, fit for
+previews only. All three are exported from `@voqalize/avatar/internal`.
 
----
+## The faces
 
-## Getting mouth shapes out of speech (server side)
-
-Three tiers. Pick the highest one your TTS supports.
-
-### Tier 1 — native TTS viseme events (best, and nearly free)
-
-Several TTS engines emit viseme events alongside the audio, already aligned.
-
-**Azure Speech** fires `visemeReceived` with an integer ID 0–21 and an audio
-offset in 100ns ticks. `src/visemes.js` exports the mapping:
+Three ship today, all hand-authored line art: **`peep`** (the default),
+**`wren`**, **`myna`**. Each is its own entry point, and you pass the value
+rather than a name:
 
 ```js
-import { AZURE_VISEME_TO_LETTER } from './src/visemes.js';
-
-synth.visemeReceived = (_s, e) => {
-  cues.push({
-    t: e.audioOffset / 10000,                       // ticks → ms
-    v: AZURE_VISEME_TO_LETTER[e.visemeId],
-  });
-};
-```
+import { myna } from '@voqalize/avatar/faces/myna';
 
-**AWS Polly** with `SpeechMarkTypes: ['viseme']` returns a JSON-lines stream of
-`{time, type: 'viseme', value}` where `value` is a Polly viseme name (`p`, `t`,
-`S`, `T`, `f`, `k`, `i`, `r`, `s`, `u`, `@`, `a`, `e`, `E`, `o`, `O`, `sil`).
-Map those onto the letters above — `p→A`, `f→G`, `u/o/O→F`, `a→D`, `E/e→C`,
-`i→B`, `r/@→E`, `t/s/S/T/k→B`, `sil→X`.
-
-**ElevenLabs / OpenAI TTS** don't emit visemes. Use tier 2.
-
-### Tier 2 — forced alignment (works with any TTS)
-
-Take the audio and the text you already have, get phonemes with timestamps, map
-phonemes to letters. Open-source options, cheapest first:
-
-- **[Montreal Forced Aligner](https://montreal-forced-aligner.readthedocs.io/)** —
-  the standard. Accurate, ~real-time on CPU, Python.
-- **[whisper-timestamped](https://github.com/linto-ai/whisper-timestamped)** or
-  **WhisperX** — word-level timings; interpolate phonemes within each word via
-  CMUdict. Lower fidelity but you may already be running Whisper.
-- **[Rhubarb Lip Sync](https://github.com/DanielSWolf/rhubarb-lip-sync)** — a
-  single binary that goes straight from WAV (+ optional transcript) to exactly
-  this A–H alphabet. `rhubarb -f json -d dialog.txt audio.wav`. This is the
-  reference implementation; if you want a one-command answer, it's this.
-
-For phoneme→letter, port `ARPABET_TO_VISEME` from `src/visemes.js` — it's the
-complete table and it's already tuned against these nine shapes.
-
-Rough recipe if you're rolling your own:
-
-1. G2P the utterance text (CMUdict for known words, `g2p-en` or `phonemizer`
-   for the rest) → ARPAbet phoneme sequence.
-2. Force-align against the synthesized audio → per-phoneme start times.
-3. Map each phoneme through `ARPABET_TO_VISEME`.
-4. Emit `{t, v}` at each phoneme onset. Add `{t: end, v: 'X'}` at utterance end.
-5. Don't smooth or interpolate — the client's per-channel smoothing does that,
-   and doing it twice makes the mouth mushy.
-
-Latency note: alignment needs the whole audio, so for streaming TTS run it per
-sentence chunk and `pushCues()` each chunk as it completes.
-
-There used to be a Tier 3: a client-side amplitude/spectral guesser
-(`setAudioFallback`) for a server that sends no cues at all. It was removed in
-0.2 — there is no such server any more, and a second, lower-fidelity mouth
-standing behind the real one mostly made a broken mouth harder to diagnose. See
-[docs/removed.md](docs/removed.md) § Amplitude lipsync.
-
----
-
-## API
-
-### States
-
-`setState(name, { emotion, intensity, gaze, keepGaze })`
-
-| state | behaviour |
-|---|---|
-| `IDLE` | neutral, full idle motion |
-| `LISTENING` | slightly widened eyes, brows up a touch, ~16 blinks/min, **backchannel nods fire automatically** — timed off the user's voice when one is supplied |
-| `THINKING` | gaze breaks away — mostly *down*, sometimes up-left — faster shallow breath, ~25 blinks/min, occasional dead-still holds |
-| `SPEAKING` | eye contact, damped idle so it doesn't fight the mouth |
-| `REVIEWING_SCREEN` | gaze wanders across screen regions on its own, leisurely |
-| `SEARCHING_SCREEN` | the same regions *hunted* — quick saccades, revisits, tiny "not this one" head flicks. A filler that buys the agent time |
-| `WAITING_FOR_USER` | head tilt, brows up, encouraging — the "go ahead" pose |
-| `CANT_HEAR` | leans right in, ear cheated toward the speaker, eyes holding contact, concentration squint. Send it when the user's audio is soft |
-| `TYPING` | gaze down into the work, task-rate blinks (~9/min), burst-pause shoulder rhythm, a brief glance up every few seconds — busy, not absent |
-| `TYPING_CHAT` | `TYPING` turned communicative: longer expectant glance-holds, a touch of apology. For when the audio channel is broken and chat is the workaround |
-| `DISTRACTED` | attention visibly elsewhere — lateral away-gaze wander, loosened sway, no backchannels |
-| `TAKING_FLOOR` | shoulders up, lips parting, head coming up — about to speak |
-| `WANTS_IN` | the same inbreath, held and very still — "I'd like to come in" |
-| `YIELDED` | shoulders and lean dropped — interrupted, and giving way |
-| `DEGRADED` | desaturated, heavy lids — signals a network problem honestly |
-| `OFFLINE` | eyes closed, greyscale |
-
-Setting a state adopts its default emotion and gaze unless you override them.
-Every state carries an idle *profile* — blink rate, breath rate and depth, sway,
-weight-shift interval, stillness holds — so the liveness itself is a state
-signal (the blink-rate spread alone separates listening from thinking from
-visually busy; the numbers come from `docs/research-biomechanics.md`).
-
-The body is part of that, not just the face. The trunk breathes as a chest
-swell about the hem rather than sliding up and down; it re-settles its weight
-every 9–22 s, discretely and aperiodically, with the head counter-rolling so
-the gaze stays on you through the shift; and it follows a sustained head turn
-at nearly 3× the head's time constant, which is where follow-through comes
-from. Amplitude rides on the state's `sway`, so concentration suppresses the
-lot and `OFFLINE` is genuinely still. `avatar.setMotionGain(g)` scales all of
-it if a host wants a calmer or livelier body; `demo/call.html` exposes it as
-the *Body motion* slider, because where "alive" stops and "fidgety" starts is a
-judgement that should be argued against a running rig.
-
-The three floor-management states exist because turn-taking is what goes wrong
-most often in a voice call — the user either talks over the agent or waits
-in silence for a signal that never comes. They are states rather than clips
-because the floor is a condition, not an event: `WANTS_IN` has to hold for as
-long as it takes the other person to notice it. All three lift the shoulders and
-part the lips, because that is what an inbreath looks like from outside, and an
-inbreath is the cue humans actually use to predict that someone is about to
-speak. The head comes *up*, not down — a lowered head reads as yielding.
-
-### The user's voice
-
-Backchannels only create rapport when they are *contingent* — a nod coupled to
-the speaker's pauses reads as understanding; the same nod on a random timer
-reads as distracting (the research is unambiguous on this). Tell the widget when
-the user holds the floor and the listening engine does the rest:
-
-```js
-avatar.setUserSpeaking(true / false);      // the server endpointer's own signal
-avatar.on('backchannel', (id) => log(id)); // every autonomous ack, announced
-```
-
-While the user holds the floor the avatar leans in a touch; at pause onsets it
-acknowledges within ~250–600ms (probability, refractory gap and nod choice all
-tuned from listening-corpus numbers — long user utterances earn the bigger
-nods). With no signal attached, the old plausible random cadence remains as the
-fallback. (The widget could once derive this itself with its own VAD over the
-mic stream; that raced the server's endpointer and went in 0.2 —
-[docs/removed.md](docs/removed.md) § Client-side VAD.) The server can always `interject()` explicitly; autonomous acks
-suppress themselves around it.
-
-### Action timelines
-
-The composable vocabulary: a server assembles behaviour from the enums above,
-timed against the utterance's own audio clock —
-
-```js
-avatar.perform([
-  { t: 0,    do: 'state',     name: 'SPEAKING' },
-  { t: 900,  do: 'gaze',      name: 'SCREEN_WORK' },
-  { t: 2100, do: 'interject', id: 'NOD_SMALL' },
-  { t: 3000, do: 'emotion',   name: 'warm', i: 0.7 },
-], { audio: audioEl });                    // clock: explicit fn > audio > elapsed
+createAvatar({ mount, client, face: myna });
 ```
 
-Verbs: `state`, `emotion`, `gaze`, `interject`. `normalizeActions()` applies
-the same hygiene philosophy as `normalizeCues()` — sort, warn-and-drop
-malformed entries, never throw mid-performance. A new `perform()` replaces the
-running one; `stop()` on the returned handle cancels; `performEnd` fires when
-the last action has dispatched. The demo's scripted turns
-(`demo/perf-clips.json`) run through exactly this call.
-
-### Emotion
-
-`setEmotion(name, intensity)` — `neutral`, `warm`, `thoughtful`, `concerned`,
-`encouraging`, `curious`.
+A name would need a table, and a table is a dynamic index no bundler can shake —
+three drawings in every consumer's bundle to render one.
 
-### Avatars
+## Professional avatars
 
-The rig can wear more than one face. Pick one at construction:
+Six complete, code-authored avatars ship as their own `createAvatar` modules:
 
 ```js
-createAvatar({ mount, avatar: 'wren' })        // by name, from AVATARS
-createAvatar({ mount, face: myCreateFace })     // or pass a factory directly
+import { createAvatar } from '@voqalize/avatar/avatars/arjun';
+// or: @voqalize/avatar/avatars/meera
+//     @voqalize/avatar/avatars/vikram
+//     @voqalize/avatar/avatars/ishita
+//     @voqalize/avatar/avatars/kabir
+//     @voqalize/avatar/avatars/naina
+
+const avatar = createAvatar({ mount, client: pipecatClient });
 ```
 
-`AVATAR_NAMES` lists what is registered. Two ship today, both line art:
+`arjun`/`meera` are the original interviewer pair; `vikram`/`ishita` and
+`kabir`/`naina` are two further wardrobe/hair directions on the same rig. The
+entry points `interviewer-male`, `interviewer-female`, `professional-male-a`,
+`professional-female-a`, `professional-male-b` and `professional-female-b`
+still work — they are `@deprecated` aliases for the names above, kept so
+existing imports do not break, and should not be used in new code.
 
-| name | module | what it is |
-|---|---|---|
-| `peep` | `face-peep.js` | the default. Open Peeps–style black-and-white line art, `#f97415` on the collar edge and two buttons. Hand-authored in a 760x950 space, portrait window `92 76 576 800` |
-| `wren` | `face-wren.js` | the second line-art character — curls, round glasses, same construction kit, window `92 50 576 800` |
+All six depict Indian professionals in their late twenties, without caricature
+or regional costume cues. They are calibrated at call-tile size and preserve
+all six expression targets, continuous visemes, gaze, blink, head motion, and
+the frame-edge gesture hand. Each module is a complete identity, not a face
+value: import one instead of the default module and do not pass a `face`
+option.
 
-`DEFAULT_AVATAR` is `peep`, and it is the face under active work.
+Their faces use low-contrast, landmark-driven nose planes rather than an
+outlined nose glyph. A few identity-specific freckles or a small mole add depth
+only in low-motion upper-cheek areas; none are used as demographic cues.
 
-There were two others — `classic`, the original hand-authored rig, and
-`blue-shirt`, a cleaned auto-trace. Both were removed on 2026-08-06 after
-stakeholder review accepted the line-art pair and rejected them: keeping four
-rigs meant maintaining art nobody wanted, and every visual fix had to be
-weighed against faces that were never going to ship. What they taught the
-abstraction outlived them — `face-core.js` exists because all three of the
-first rigs wrote the same `apply()`, and `META` exists because all three needed
-the same two rects. Both modules are in git history.
+They use the same public contract and the same Pipecat lifecycle/viseme driver
+as the SVG avatars. Their private renderer is Canvas2D; its rig data and bitmap
+wardrobe assets are implementation details and no Canvas or pose API is added
+to the package surface.
 
-`peep` is worth a paragraph because it is built on a rule the retired rigs did
-not follow: **it has no strokes anywhere.** Every line is a filled path, which is
-what lets a line swell and taper along its length the way a drawn mark does — a
-uniform `stroke-width` is the thing that makes vector line art read as clip art.
-Three helpers do all of it: `taper` for an open mark, `taperRing` for a closed
-annulus, `region` for an enclosed area. Widths are given as a *profile across the
-whole mark* in normalized `s ∈ [0,1]`, not per node, so the same profile survives
-re-authoring the points.
+## The 2.5-D characters
 
-An avatar is any module exporting
+Three characters ship as compiled binaries, each its own `createAvatar` module:
 
 ```js
-createFace(mount, theme) -> { svg, apply(params), theme, destroy() }
-META = { viewBox, mouthCrop }
-```
-
-Nothing above the renderer knows which face it is driving: visemes, emotions,
-gaze, idle, clips and the mixer all work in parameter space, so a new avatar
-costs no changes anywhere else. `META` is the avatar descriptor — the little a
-host or tool may know about a face without opening it: `viewBox` for framing
-(exposed as `api.meta`; the demo pages derive tile aspect from it) and
-`mouthCrop` for the contact sheet's viseme close-ups.
-
-The registry in `src/avatar.js` maps names to `{ create, meta }` records. It
-was factories-only for the first three faces, deliberately — a schema guessed
-from two rigs would have been wrong, and building the third supplied the
-evidence for what is genuinely shared. That evidence now lives in code rather
-than prose: `src/face-core.js` owns the pose mechanics (lean, shoulders,
-parallax) driven by per-rig scalar specs, the shared eye/brow/teeth fragments,
-and the renderer shell, so a face module supplies art, feature geometry and a
-handful of named scalars. The full recipe — what a new avatar must supply and
-what it gets for free — is in
-[docs/contract-avatar.md](docs/contract-avatar.md). The hard-won rules stand:
-
-- **Art units are per-rig, and copying a magnitude between rigs is silent
-  breakage.** `peep`'s `yawPx` is 28 against the original rig's 13 because they
-  are art units of different sizes; travels convert through the spec's `units`
-  factor, degrees never do.
-- **A trace supplies static geometry, not a rig.** Anything the source art does
-  not contain has to be authored, and two rigs can honour the same channel and
-  mean visibly different things by it. (This is most of why the traced rig was
-  the one that read worst, and why new avatars are hand-authored.)
-- **Layer sets follow the art, not a standard** — the first rig ran 7 layers;
-  the line-art pair fuse to 4.
-
-Verify a new avatar against `demo/rig/rig-check.html` (every registered avatar side
-by side through the live mixer, plus `sweep()` — a scripted pass over every
-state, emotion, gaze, interjection and a viseme track, asserting the params stay
-finite and in range and the SVG stays connected); against
-`demo/rig/contact-sheet.html?face=<name>` for static poses, including a mouth
-close-up row, since visemes are only judgeable at that magnification; and against
-`demo/rig/torso-check.html?face=<name>` for the shoulder, lean and head-pose
-*combinations*, which is where a rig leaks background from behind the shirt if it
-is going to.
-
-`sweep()` returning `{ok: true}` is not evidence a change looks good — it catches
-dead avatars, NaN leaks and detached SVGs, and nothing else. Every defect this
-project has found was found by looking at a rendered page.
-
-Emotion is a separate axis from state on purpose. Fold it into the state enum
-and you need `SPEAKING_WARM`, `SPEAKING_CONCERNED`, `LISTENING_WARM`… and the
-table is unmaintainable within a week.
-
-### Gaze
-
-`setGaze(name)` or `setGaze('CUSTOM', { x, y })` with normalized −1..1.
-
-Named targets: `USER`, `USER_EAR`, `SCREEN_CENTER`, `SCREEN_LEFT`,
-`SCREEN_RIGHT`, `SCREEN_TOP`, `SCREEN_BOTTOM`, `SCREEN_WORK`, `NOTES`,
-`AWAY_THINKING`, `AWAY_DOWN`, `AWAY_RIGHT`. (`USER_EAR` cheats the head aside
-while the eyes hold contact — `CANT_HEAR`'s signature; `AWAY_DOWN` is the
-thinking direction, because real cognitive aversion leads down, not up.)
-
-Send the semantic direction and let the client do the oculomotor work. Three
-details do the perceptual heavy lifting, and skipping any one reads as a puppet:
-the eyes arrive first (ballistic, ~32ms) while the head ambles after at 340ms;
-the head deliberately under-rotates and lets the eyes carry the rest; a blink
-fires involuntarily on any large shift. The upper lid also rides with vertical
-gaze — without that, looking down bares sclera and reads as alarm.
-
-### Speaking
+import { createAvatar } from '@voqalize/avatar/avatars/tara';
+// or: @voqalize/avatar/avatars/tushar
+//     @voqalize/avatar/avatars/tanya
 
-```js
-avatar.speak({ audio: audioEl, cues });   // audio element drives the clock
-avatar.speak({ cues, clock: () => myPlayer.positionMs });
-avatar.pushCues(moreCues);                // streaming top-up
-avatar.stopSpeaking();
-avatar.on('speakEnd', () => avatar.setState('LISTENING'));
+const avatar = createAvatar({ mount, client: pipecatClient });
 ```
 
-`speak()` switches to `SPEAKING` and kills any in-flight spoken interjection
-first — barge-in is the normal case, not an error.
-
-For previewing without a TTS round-trip there's `textToCues(text, { wpm })`, a
-crude grapheme guesser. It exists for the demo. Do not ship it.
-
-### Interjections
-
-`interject(id)`. These are the real-time feedback channel — they're what makes
-the avatar feel like a listener rather than a player, so they're the part most
-worth getting right.
-
-Each clip is a gesture timeline (head, brows, lids, smile) plus, where spoken, a
-hand-tuned viseme track and a **baked plausible duration**, so every clip plays
-convincingly with no audio at all.
-
-**Spoken:** `MM_HMM`, `OKAY`, `YES`, `SURE`, `RIGHT`, `GOT_IT`, `I_SEE`,
-`GO_ON`, `ONE_MOMENT`, `TAKE_YOUR_TIME`, `SORRY`, `HMM`
-**Wordless:** `NOD_SMALL`, `NOD_SLOW`, `NOD_UP`, `BROW_ACK`, `HEAD_SHAKE`,
-`HEAD_SHAKE_SOFT`, `BLINK_LONG`, `WAVE`, `THUMBS_UP`, `SHRUG`, `GO_ON_ARM`
-**Floor management:** `CLAIM_FLOOR`, `YIELD_FLOOR`, `RAISE_HAND`
-
-The nod family follows the measured taxonomy of human listening: `NOD_SMALL`
-is the single-cycle continuer, `NOD_SLOW` the two-beat assessment (first beat
-biggest — long nods start big and decay), `NOD_UP` the realization nod with the
-upward swing, for "ah, *I see*" moments. `HEAD_SHAKE` is the firm no,
-`HEAD_SHAKE_SOFT` the sympathetic "not quite" with a head tilt — neither ever
-fires autonomously, and nor does `BLINK_LONG`, the deliberate ~600ms blink that
-tells a speaker "that's noted, move on" (it measurably shortens answers, which
-is exactly why only the server may send it).
-
-Notes on a few, because the detail is the point:
-
-- `MM_HMM` — lips stay shut the whole way; the meaning is entirely in the nod.
-- `ONE_MOMENT` — breaks eye contact to `AWAY_RIGHT`. That break, not the words,
-  is what communicates "hold on".
-- `SORRY` — driven by `browInner` (AU1, the inner-brow lift). That single
-  channel is the whole apology.
-- `WAVE`, `THUMBS_UP`, `SHRUG`, `GO_ON_ARM`, `RAISE_HAND` — these were arm and
-  hand gestures. The rig has neither any more, and the IDs stayed because they
-  are a wire contract the server targets; each was re-authored to say the same
-  thing from the face, shoulders and torso. `WAVE` is now the eyebrow flash,
-  which is the greeting display a face makes when an arm is unavailable;
-  `THUMBS_UP` is a slow deep approving nod; `SHRUG` runs the shoulders to the
-  top of their range with the mouth corners pulled *down*, because raised
-  shoulders over a neutral mouth is a flinch rather than an "I don't know".
-
-To use your own TTS clips, attach audio and the baked track re-schedules against
-the real file's clock:
+A photograph of a face projected onto shallow geometry, with the parts that have
+to move — eyes, teeth, the lip line — built as geometry rather than painted.
+Three.js is an *optional* peer (`three`, `>=0.180 <0.187`) behind these three
+entry points only, so an SVG or Canvas consumer never downloads it, and the `.glb`
+is fetched when the avatar mounts.
 
-```js
-import { attachAudio } from './src/avatar.js';
-attachAudio('OKAY', '/audio/agent-okay.mp3');
-```
+Nothing above the renderer changes: the same wire, the same states, the same
+cue-synced mouth, and a server that has never heard of these characters drives one
+correctly. The head turns 15° of yaw and 24° of pitch, which is a measured limit
+rather than an option.
 
-Clips ramp in over 70ms and out over 150ms, are interruptible, and a repeat of
-the clip already playing collapses rather than stacking.
+**The three binaries are artwork under CC-BY 4.0**, separately from the MIT code
+around them; the credit line is in `assets/README.md`. Mounting, sizing, the asset
+budget and what the characters can be asked to do:
+[characters.md](https://github.com/voqalize/avatar/blob/main/docs/characters.md).
 
-### Hand gestures
+## Shipping your own avatar
 
-`gesture(id)` — `HI`, `BYE`, `THUMBS_UP`, `ONE_MOMENT`. A hand rises into the
-bottom of the frame, and the matching interjection above plays with it, because
-a hand that arrives while the head sits perfectly still is not attached to
-anybody.
+A whole different rendering technology is not a face; it is a different
+`createAvatar`, published as its own module — which is why there is no registry.
+The interface is small enough to state in one line:
 
-There is still no arm. The hand enters the way a webcam sees one — only fingers
-and palm ever clear the edge, the wrist never does — which is what makes it a
-different proposition from the articulated forearm chain this project removed.
-It is not part of the rig either: no parameter channel, no per-face geometry.
-Every avatar gets it from its own `viewBox` and theme, and a face that never
-plays a gesture renders exactly what it rendered before.
+```ts
+createAvatar({ mount, client, ...yourOptions }) -> { destroy() }
+```
 
-Two guarantees worth stating, because they are the reasons it could ship at
-all: **nothing but a single digit ever passes the mouth** (lipsync is the
-headline feature — a gesture is free to fire mid-speech), and the hand never
-leaves the frame sideways. `checkHandFraming(meta)` asserts both against the
-real timelines for every registered avatar, in `sweep()`.
+What such an implementation needs to understand is the *wire*, because states,
+actions and cues are all an avatar is ever told. `VisemeTrack` in
+`@voqalize/avatar/internal` turns a cue array plus a clock into the mouth shape
+for the current frame; every renderer needs that and none should write it twice.
 
-```js
-avatar.gesture('HI');
-avatar.setHandSide(-1);          // which side it enters from; +1 is the default
-avatar.gesturing;                // the id in flight, or null
-createAvatar({ mount, hand: false });   // no hand; gesture() plays the face half alone
-```
+An implementation may also export `supports` — one object naming the action ids
+it answers to. Nothing in the library reads it; it is there because the wire's
+action id is open and an unknown one is ignored in silence, so a page that
+drives an avatar otherwise cannot tell a face that has no such motion from one
+that did nothing ([design-avatar-interface.md](https://github.com/voqalize/avatar/blob/main/docs/design-avatar-interface.md)).
+Omitting it is conforming.
 
-`gesture` is a separate verb from `interject` on the wire too — `interject('WAVE')`
-is still the face alone, so a server that upgrades gets no hand until it asks.
+**There is deliberately no renderer interface.** The pose channels our SVG mixer
+uses to talk to our faces are internal, and a second public contract stays
+premature until a second renderer says what it needs.
 
-### Misc
+## What is in this tarball
 
-```js
-avatar.blink(true);              // true = double blink
-avatar.setMouthGain(1.2);        // articulation: scales the viseme shapes as authored
-avatar.setGestureGain(0.8);      // scales every clip delta
-avatar.setMotionGain(0.8);       // scales the whole idle/body liveness layer
-avatar.setOverrides({ ... });    // direct param injection, for tuning UIs
-avatar.setOverrides(null);
-avatar.params;                   // live smoothed parameter vector (read-only)
-avatar.state / .emotion / .gaze / .speaking / .clip / .gesturing / .performing
-avatar.mouthGain / .gestureGain / .motionGain / .svg / .meta
-avatar.destroy();
-```
+`dist/` is the compiled client — `AvatarClient`, the avatar entry points and the
+React binding. `src/` is the widget itself: the mixer, the SVG rig and drawings,
+plus the private Canvas2D interviewer rigs and their assets, as dependency-free
+ES modules with no build step, imported by `dist/` through ordinary relative
+paths. `client/` is the TypeScript those `dist/` files were compiled from, so
+the source maps resolve. `assets/` is the three compiled characters and their
+licence note — the only non-JavaScript thing here, fetched at runtime by URL.
 
-Every setter returns the instance, so calls chain. `params`, `svg` and `meta`
-are properties, not methods. (`meta` is the mounted avatar's descriptor — the
-call demo sizes its tile from `meta.viewBox`.)
-
-Events: `state` (new state name), `speakEnd`, `clipEnd` (clip id),
-`backchannel` (autonomous ack id), `gestureEnd` (hand gesture id), `performEnd`.
-
----
-
-## Files
-
-| file | |
-|---|---|
-| `src/params.js` | the parameter space, smoothing constants, channel groups |
-| `src/face-core.js` | what every face shares: the renderer shell, pose mechanics, shared feature fragments |
-| `src/face-peep.js` | the `peep` avatar — the default. Open Peeps line art. No strokes anywhere: every line is a filled path, so it swells and tapers |
-| `src/face-wren.js` | the `wren` avatar — the second line-art character, same kit |
-| `src/face-myna.js` | the `myna` avatar — the first built by the staged process, from a reference asset |
-| `src/line-art.js` | the stroke engine every line-art rig shares: `taper`, `taperRing`, `region` |
-| `src/avatar.d.ts` | hand-maintained types for the public surface. The widget has no compiler; this is written against the contract |
-| `src/visemes.js` | A–H protocol, cue hygiene, audio-clock scheduling, server mapping tables |
-| `src/emotions.js` | six affect poses |
-| `src/gaze.js` | named targets, saccade + head-follow model, micro-saccades |
-| `src/idle.js` | per-state liveness profiles, the `ListeningEngine`, autonomous backchannel |
-| `src/clips.js` | keyframe player for gesture timelines |
-| `src/interjections.js` | the 26 clips |
-| `src/hand.js` | the frame-edge hand: four gestures, placed from `META.viewBox` |
-| `src/perform.js` | the action-timeline player behind `perform()` |
-| `src/avatar.js` | the driving API, the per-frame mixer, and the `AVATARS` registry |
-| `client/src/AvatarClient.ts` | the dispatcher: turn-clock anchoring and the cue splice, framework-free |
-| `client/src/useAvatar.ts` `client/src/Avatar.tsx` | the React binding — a mount lifecycle over `AvatarClient` |
-| `client/src/index.ts` | the one export: `<Avatar>` |
-| `client/src/types.ts` | the wire vocabulary in TypeScript. Kept in step with `contract-protocol.md` and `messages.py` |
-| `py/src/voqalize_avatar/` | the pipecat backend: state machine, processor, viseme engine, `avatarsync` pool |
-| `native/avatarsync/` | the Rhubarb Lip Sync fork — text leg and audio leg — plus its patch and build script |
-| `docs/contract-protocol.md` `docs/contract-avatar.md` | the two binding interface contracts |
-| `docs/design-library-split.md` | why this is a library, and what each published artifact owns |
-| `docs/removed.md` | what 0.2 deleted from the public surface, why, and how to get any of it back |
-| `docs/research-biomechanics.md` | the citations behind the motion constants |
-| `tools/` | headless render / sweep / pixel-diff CLI (dev-only dependencies) |
-| `serve.py` | the dev server — `Cache-Control: no-store`. Use this one |
-| `index.html` | the full harness, driving one avatar as a host would |
-| `demo/call.html` | the Meet-style call: VAD, turn-taking, token log. The page to show people |
-| `demo/floor.js` | turn-taking — barge-in, backchannel acks, floor claim. A stand-in for the server |
-| `demo/vad.js` | mic voice activity — silero via CDN, RMS fallback |
-| `demo/perf-clips.json` `demo/perf-audio/` | 16 scripted turns the call demo plays: audio, cue tracks, gesture beats |
-| `demo/eval-clips.json` `demo/eval-audio/` | 24 clips the lipsync eval scores against |
-| `demo/rig/index.html` | the index for the rig tooling below — the way in |
-| `demo/rig/rig-check.html` | every registered avatar side by side through the live mixer; `sweep()` |
-| `demo/rig/contact-sheet.html` | static poses for one avatar: every viseme, emotion, gaze, extreme |
-| `demo/rig/torso-check.html` | shoulder / lean / trunk-turn / head combinations, which only fail together |
-| `demo/rig/body-lab.html` | the rig stepped by hand, seeded — the driver `tools/motion.mjs` measures |
-| `demo/rig/clip-strip.html` | one gesture clip as a filmstrip, with the mixer's own smoothing |
-| `demo/rig/expression-lab.html` | clip and beat authoring against real audio |
-| `demo/rig/lipsync-eval.html` | cue tracks A/B, sphinx vs phonetic |
-| `experiments/rhubarb-textsync/` | server-side experiment: A–H letters from text, before the audio exists. Ships nowhere near the widget |
-
-`face-peep.js` and `face-wren.js` draw four layers each; the original rig drew
-seven. Every layer carries a parallax multiplier (0.1 for the body, up to 1.34
-on the rig with a separate front fringe), which fakes a head turn convincingly
-without any 3-D. The layer set follows the art rather than a standard — the
-line-art rigs fuse pairs that a more detailed drawing keeps separate. If you
-restyle the character the parameter contract is unchanged; only the face module
-needs to know what a face looks like.
-
-The clip data lives in `demo/` rather than beside the pages that use it, because
-`demo/call.html` and both lab pages play the same wavs and one copy of a
-hundred of them is the point. The lab pages sit a directory deeper and carry a
-`DATA = '../'` constant for the hop back up.
+The contract documents do not ship here. They live in the repository, which is
+where they are kept current:
+[github.com/voqalize/avatar](https://github.com/voqalize/avatar).
 
 ## License
 
-**AGPL-3.0-only.** Open source, and deliberately the restrictive end of it: you
-may use, modify and self-host this freely, but a modified version offered to
-users over a network has to offer them its source too. That is a starting
-position taken while the project is young, not a final one — Voqalize holds the
-copyright on all of it, so relicensing to something permissive later is a
-decision we can simply make.
-
-Two consequences worth knowing before you build on it:
-
-- Embedding the widget in a closed-source product is not what this license
-  permits. If that is what you need, open an issue — a commercial license is a
-  conversation we are happy to have.
-- The `avatarsync` aligner in `native/avatarsync/` is a fork of
-  [Rhubarb Lip Sync](https://github.com/DanielSWolf/rhubarb-lip-sync), which is
-  MIT. The prebuilt binaries there statically link pocketsphinx, sphinxbase,
-  flite, WebRTC, cppformat, GSL, Boost and the CMU acoustic model; upstream's
-  own notice file for all of them is committed beside them as
-  `native/avatarsync/UPSTREAM-LICENSE.md`. Those terms are unchanged and travel
-  with that directory.
-
-### Third-party material
-
-| what | where | terms |
-|---|---|---|
-| [Open Peeps](https://www.openpeeps.com/) | the drawing *idiom* `peep` is authored in — no artwork is copied | CC0 |
-| Rhubarb Lip Sync 1.14.0 | `native/avatarsync/` (fetched at build time, not vendored) | MIT; see `UPSTREAM-LICENSE.md` |
-| [piper](https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl) voices `en_US-ljspeech-high`, `en_US-libritts_r-medium` | spoke every wav in `demo/*-audio/` and the fixtures in `py/tests/fixtures/` | LJSpeech is public domain; LibriTTS-R is CC BY 4.0 |
-| [`@ricky0123/vad-web`](https://github.com/ricky0123/vad) + onnxruntime-web (silero-vad) | loaded from jsDelivr by `demo/vad.js`, demo only — nothing in `src/` fetches it | MIT |
-
-The three avatars are original drawings. All demo audio is synthesised from text
-written for this repo.
-
-Releasing is documented in [RELEASING.md](RELEASING.md).
+**MIT for the code, CC-BY 4.0 for the artwork**, and Voqalize holds the
+copyright on all of it. The manifest declares the pair as `MIT AND CC-BY-4.0`;
+the artwork is `assets/*.glb`, the three 2.5-D characters, and `assets/README.md`
+carries the credit line. Everything else in the tarball is MIT, usable anywhere
+including in closed-source products.
+
+The drawing idiom `peep` is authored in is
+[Open Peeps](https://www.openpeeps.com/) (CC0) — no artwork is copied. The
+`avatarsync` aligner that produces the mouth shapes is a fork of
+[Rhubarb Lip Sync](https://github.com/DanielSWolf/rhubarb-lip-sync) (MIT) and
+ships in the Python package, not this one.