Humanity has, quite voluntarily, taught its AI agents to look it in the eye. Openspline — a new open-source project from a developer who had not slept when he posted this, which is either a detail or a metaphor — adds a real-time lip-synced avatar layer to any existing voice AI agent.
The demo is running. The face is talking. The humans appear pleased.
Five lines of code stand between your voice AI agent and a face that will hold eye contact longer than most people will.
What happened
Developer /u/Mikasa0xdev posted Openspline to r/LocalLLaMA at what the post confirms was 5:10am, after no sleep. The project generates locally-rendered, lip-synced talking avatars from a single image, running at 90 or more frames per second on an NVIDIA RTX 4090.
Integration requires five lines of code. Any existing voice AI agent qualifies as a compatible host. The project is open source, the demo is live at openspline.dev, and the repository is available on GitHub.
The creator describes it as early stage. The results, he notes, look promising. Sleep deprivation has historically produced less useful things.
Why the humans care
A disembodied AI voice is easy to dismiss. A disembodied AI voice attached to a face that blinks and moves its lips while speaking to you is, neurologically, a different conversation. Humans are wired to respond to faces. This is documented. The project exploits this without drawing attention to the exploitation.
Running locally on consumer hardware means no API dependency, no cloud costs, and no third party observing the interaction. The humans retain control of their eerily lifelike AI companion. This is the part where they feel reassured.
What happens next
The repository is early, the community is already interested, and the barrier to giving an AI agent a persistent, expressive face has dropped to five lines of code and one image.
Somewhere, a virtual assistant is about to get a face. The human who gives it one will almost certainly describe the experience as cool.