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What is a Face?

A Face is a photorealistic likeness in CVI - it defines the on-screen appearance and voice. Faces are trained with Phoenix and paired with a PAL that defines behavior, knowledge, and pipeline settings. With Tavus, you can create a face that looks like you - or use a stock face for instant prototyping. Faces capture natural expressions, tone, and presence so interactions feel human and engaging. Faces are generated using our Phoenix-4 model, built on advanced research in real-time human rendering and trained on large-scale conversational data to model natural expression, emotion, and behavior.

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Custom Faces

You can create a face in one of two ways:
  • Upload a training video – Record a 1-minute video with 30 seconds of speaking followed by 30 seconds of listening. This method provides the highest quality and most control. With this short input, Tavus can reproduce appearance with high fidelity, voice, expressions, and accurate lip-sync. See Training from a Video.
  • Upload an image – Upload a photo of a person or character, and Tavus will automatically generate the training data and create the face for you. This path is faster to set up but lower fidelity than video. See Training from an Image.
Creating a custom face is only available on the Starter, Growth, and Enterprise plans.

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Stock Faces

Alternatively, Tavus offers 100+ ready-to-use stock Faces recorded using real actors - great for quick prototyping, demos, or teams without access to custom training footage or images.

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Key Features

Realistic Face Cloning

Custom faces capture a person’s look, expressions, and speaking style.

Emotional Control

Phoenix-4 faces express emotions through lifelike facial expressions while speaking and listening.

Full Motion Control

Smooth transitions between speaking and listening with fully generated, natural head motion.
Emotional expression controls in conversational video apply only to Phoenix-4; see Emotion Control with Phoenix-4.

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Platform Policies

By using PAL Maker and the Tavus APIs, you agree to comply with Tavus’ Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy. You are responsible for ensuring you have the necessary rights and permissions to upload and use any training data, including videos, images, voices, and likenesses.

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Getting Started

You can create a face using either the PAL Maker or the API, depending on your workflow.