Runway News | Introducing Runway Characters

Introducing Runway Characters

March 9, 2026

by Runway

A real-time video agent API that lets you build fully custom conversational characters, powered by GWM-1.

Today, we're launching Runway Characters, a real-time video agent API that lets you build fully custom conversational characters. These video agents can have any appearance and any visual style, with full control over voice, personality, knowledge and actions. Built on our recently launched world model, GWM-1, Characters lets you generate expressive digital personas from a single image, with zero fine-tuning required.

The internet has generally worked the same way since it was invented. Humans input questions or information, and the machine retrieves a result. LLMs and chatbots made the experience more interactive, but they're still just text in a box. We believe the future of online interactions will be based on real-time video: experiences created on the fly, custom characters you can interact with and generated worlds you can build and explore. With Characters, you can deploy any avatar—photorealistic or animated, human or non-human—with full conversational expressiveness, from a single image. This enables:

• Instant character generation across the full range of visual styles, all from a single image – from photorealistic humans to animated mascots to stylized brand characters
• Full conversational expressiveness including natural facial expressions, eye movements, lip-syncing and gestures during both speaking and listening
• Real-time performance that maintains quality across extended conversations without degradation
• Complete customization of voice, personality, knowledge base and actions through API

Built for Enterprise Teams

Characters is designed for anyone deploying conversational AI at scale—from startups to enterprise teams—across a wide variety of use cases:

• Customer Support: Deploy branded characters that feel human while maintaining your visual identity. Whether you're using your actual customer service representatives or creating stylized brand ambassadors, your support experience can now match your brand standards.
• Learning & Development: Bring training programs to life with interactive tutors and coaches. Create characters that represent your instructors, historical figures or entirely fictional guides – all capable of holding extended educational conversations with natural expressiveness.
• Brand & Marketing Experiences: Finally use your actual brand IP. That mascot you've spent years developing can now hold conversations. Your animated characters can engage customers in real-time. Your creative vision doesn't have to stop at static, pre-recorded content.

Partners including BBC and Silverside are actively using Characters already, and we're rolling the tool out to all customers today.

How It Works

Getting started with Characters is straightforward:

1. Define your character with a single reference image
2. Configure the experience including voice, physical characteristics, personality, knowledge and conversational actions
3. Deploy via API and integrate into your product, website or application

The API gives you complete control over every aspect of the avatar experience. Define what the character knows, how it speaks, what actions it can take and how it behaves in conversation, with no fine-tuning required. For brands, this means your avatar can create a support ticket, take customer orders based on your inventory or pull from your enterprise knowledge base to answer questions, all in real-time.

Try It Today

We're launching Characters to our developer platform today. Enterprise teams can start building custom avatar experiences immediately at dev.runwayml.com.

For consumers, we're launching preset avatars in the Runway web app so you can experience Characters firsthand.

Ready to get started? Create your first avatar at dev.runwayml.com or learn more about GWM-1 and our General World Models research.

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