Businesses and developers are increasingly integrating artificial agents and chatbots into their applications, but interactions with them remain largely textual for now. Lemon Slice is working on adding a video layer to such chats using a new diffusion model that can create digital avatars from a single image.
The name of this solution is Lemon Slice-2. The model can form a digital avatar that operates on a knowledge base and performs any role an artificial agent would need, such as answering customer inquiries, helping with homework, or acting as a mental health support agent.
“In the early days of GenAI, my co-founders started experimenting with different video models, and it became clear to us that video is interactive. The attractive part of tools like ChatGPT is that it's interactive, and we want that level of video as well.”
Lemon Slice claims it is a 20 billion parameter model that can run on a single GPU and stream video at 20 frames per second. The company offers its models through an API and embedded widgets that can be integrated into your website with a single line of code. After creating your avatar, you can change its background, style, and appearance at any time.
In addition to humanoid avatars, developers are also focusing on the ability to create non-human characters for different needs. The startup uses Eleven Labs' technology to shape the voices of these avatars.
Founded in 2024 by Lina Colucci, Sydney Primus, and Andrew Weitz, Lemon Slice hopes to stand out among its competitors by creating avatars using its unique popular adoption model.
“This is a highly technical team with a track record of releasing ML products as well as demos and research. While many other players focus on individual scenarios or verticals, Lemon Slice applies common data and compute scaling approaches that have worked in other AI modalities.”
The team currently has eight people, and the company plans to use the funding to hire additional engineering and marketing staff, as well as cover computational costs to train the model.
Funding and competition in the avatar market
Further development of Lemon Slice is expected to draw attention to the use of video avatars in education, online customer support, and corporate training while maintaining privacy and content quality.
