Convai Explained (2026): What It Is, What It Costs, and How Its AI Characters Remember

Convai is a platform for building AI characters that talk, see and act inside 3D worlds. A developer writes the character — backstory, knowledge, personality, voice — in Convai’s web tools, then drops it into a game or simulation through plugins for Unreal Engine, Unity or the browser. The character listens to the player’s voice, answers aloud with lip-sync, and can carry out actions in the scene. Convai’s homepage sums it up as “Conversational AI for Virtual Worlds.”

If you have heard of Convai, it is probably because of a ramen shop. In May 2023 NVIDIA launched NVIDIA ACE with a demo in which a player chats freely with Jin, the owner of a noodle bar in a neon city. Convai built that character. Three years later it is still selling the same idea — while its best-known rival, Inworld AI, has left the character business for voice and infrastructure.

This page is built from Convai’s own website, pricing page, blog and documentation. We have not built anything with Convai, and nothing here is scored.

Convai is a trademark of its owner. Arcanum is independent and unaffiliated with Convai and with every company named here; names are used only to identify the products.

The Short Answers

What is it? A platform and set of engine plugins for building AI characters that converse by voice and act inside 3D worlds.
Who is it for? Developers and creators. There is a no-code web tool, but no game for players to download.
Is it free? There is a free plan with 100 interactions a month and one monthly active end user. That is for testing.
What does it cost to ship? Paid plans run from $29 to $1,199 a month (less on yearly billing), and each caps how many different players can use your characters each month.
Does it remember players? Yes, on paid plans: facts are saved per player and per character at the end of each session.

What Convai Does

Convai’s documentation describes the workflow in three steps: craft the character’s mind, give it a body, and put it in a world.

The mind. In the Convai Playground, a web dashboard, you write the character’s description and speaking style and set:

Knowledge Bank — documents the character draws on, such as the lore of your world. When Convai introduced it in 2023, it said it “helps mitigate the ‘hallucination of information’ issue that plagues the best LLMs.”
Personality traits, language and voice (its pricing page lists “60+ Languages” and “500+ Voice Options”), and guardrails that set what the character will and will not talk about.
Core AI settings — which language model the character runs on, and how inventive it is.
Narrative Design — a graph of goals and decision points. In the documentation’s words, “Instead of hard coding a tree of lines, you define goals and decision points, then allow the character to respond dynamically.”
Actions — what the character can do in the scene, such as walking somewhere or picking something up, triggered by conversation.
Mindview — a view of “the actual prompts to the LLM” for each interaction. Most platforms hide that, and seeing it is the fastest way to learn why a character said something odd.

The body. Characters can be given a 3D avatar, including Unreal’s MetaHumans and Reallusion characters, with lip-sync and animation. Convai also offers vision: its pricing page says characters can “perceive and understand their surroundings, whether through a webcam or a virtual game environment.”

The world. Developers integrate through the Unreal Engine plugin (open source, Apache 2.0, on GitHub), the Unity SDK, a Web SDK, and APIs. Non-programmers can use Avatar Studio and Convai Sim, which build and run 3D experiences in the browser, streamed from Convai’s servers so no local graphics card is needed, and publish them at a shareable link.

The Kairos demo

NVIDIA announced ACE for Games at Computex on 28 May 2023. Its announcement says NVIDIA “collaborated with Convai, an NVIDIA Inception startup,” which “integrated ACE modules into its end-to-end real-time avatar platform.” In the demo, called Kairos, the player asks Jin how he is. Jin answers, “Unfortunately, not so good,” and talks about rising crime before giving the player what the story needs.

Convai’s own account, published that September, stresses the point: “None of this is scripted.” It also names its chief executive, Purnendu Mukherjee, who it says was on the NVIDIA team that built the NeMo language-model framework and the Jarvis conversational-AI framework.

Convai Pricing

From Convai’s pricing page, checked 27 September 2026. “Interactions” are Convai’s unit of use.

Plan	Monthly billing	Yearly billing (per month)	Interactions / month	Monthly active end users	Session concurrency
Free	$0	$0	100	1	1
Indie Dev	$29	$22	3,000	75	1
Professional	$99	$69	10,000	250	3
Scale	$499	$299	50,000	1,250	15
Business	$1,199	$499 (“limited time offer”)	125,000	2,500	30
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom	Custom	Custom

A few limits matter more than the headline prices:

Monthly active end users. This is the number of different people who can talk to your characters in a month. The free plan allows one — you. Indie Dev allows 75. If you are building a game for strangers, this column, not the interaction count, is likely to decide your plan.
Session concurrency. How many conversations one API key can run at the same time. Indie Dev allows one, so two players talking at once is already beyond it.
Flagship models are capped. Each plan limits interactions with what Convai calls “Flagship LLMs” — from 50 a month on Free to 50,000 on Business. The pricing page still names them as “Gemini 1.5 pro, GPT4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet,” models that are older than the current ones from all three makers; check inside the product which models you actually get.
Premium voices are capped too. “HQ Third Party Voices such as ElevenLabs Voices” are not included on Free and are limited on paid plans.
Memory is paid. Long-term memory is listed as not included on Free and included on every paid plan.
Cloud-rendered time. Avatar Studio and Convai Sim are metered in minutes, from 60 a month on Free to 21,000 on Business.

Enterprise adds service-level agreements, a separate deployment, data ownership terms and an on-premises option “to deploy and run all of Convai Backend including every AI service in your datacenter.”

How Convai’s Long-Term Memory Works

Memory is the problem every AI character runs into, and Convai documents its approach clearly. It is worth understanding even if you never use Convai, because it is a common design.

According to the documentation, long-term memory gives a character “a persistent, per-user knowledge store that survives across separate conversation sessions.” It works in four steps:

Connect. When a player starts talking, Convai looks up what it has stored for that player and that character, and “injects any existing facts into the character’s context before the first response is generated.”
Conversation. The character talks with those facts in mind. But “new information shared during the conversation is not stored in real time; it is held in the session buffer.”
Session end. Convai “processes the conversation transcript and extracts meaningful facts (names, roles, preferences, completed tasks, stated history)” and saves them as short sentences, such as “The user’s name is Jordan.”
Next connect. The new facts are injected along with the old ones.

Two design choices follow from that. Memory is per character: “There is no cross-character memory sharing,” so if a player tells the blacksmith a secret, the innkeeper will never know. And memory follows an ID: if the player’s identifier changes — the documentation’s example is saved preferences being cleared — “Convai treats the new value as a new user.”

This is the “summarise and re-inject” pattern: the character remembers facts about you, not the conversation itself. It is the same family of design as the per-NPC summaries in Skyrim’s AI mods, and it has the same strength and weakness. It keeps the character’s context small and cheap, but it only remembers what the extraction step decided was worth keeping. Our explainer on why AI RPGs forget covers the trade-off in full.

Where Players Meet Convai

Convai sells to builders, so most players will only ever meet it inside someone else’s project. There are three places you can see it yourself:

Published experiences in the browser. Characters made in Avatar Studio can be published at a link and embedded on websites. Convai’s homepage currently features one, “Meet Jake,” which you can start from the page.
Mods, as demonstrations. In March 2024 Convai announced a modding framework for Unreal and Unity games, and said it had tested it by “creating mods for two of the most popular games in recent years: Hogwarts Legacy and Cyberpunk 2077.” The announcement points to video tutorials for mod makers, not to downloads for players.
The Kairos demo, which is still the best-known thing Convai has made, and which you can watch but not play.

We found no commercial game that Convai names as running on its platform, and we have not listed any here.

Is Convai Still About Games?

Partly. The Internet Archive shows Convai’s homepage titled “Conversational AI for Games” in March 2022 and “Conversational AI for Virtual Worlds” by January 2024, which it still reads today. The homepage now lists three use cases, in this order: Brand Marketing, Learning & Training, and Social Worlds and Gaming. Several of its 2025 blog posts are about training — healthcare, sales, “XR training simulations,” and a NASA lunar-mission simulation with a partner.

That is a smaller move than Inworld’s, and a different one. Inworld stopped selling characters and started selling their parts, mainly voice. Convai kept selling characters and widened the list of people it sells them to. Both moves point to the same fact: in 2026 the steady money for AI characters is outside games.

Convai Alternatives

If Convai is not the right fit, the other routes are quite different from each other:

NVIDIA ACE — NVIDIA’s own toolkit, with MIT-licensed Unreal plugins and an Apache 2.0 Game Agent SDK that runs small models on the player’s RTX graphics card instead of in the cloud. It is the nearest open-source route. See our NVIDIA ACE guide.
Inworld AI — no longer a character platform, but it sells realtime text-to-speech, speech-to-text and a speech-to-speech API that developers can build characters from. See our Inworld AI guide.
Building it yourself on a general language-model API — what many small games and mods do. The Skyrim mods Mantella, CHIM and SkyrimNet show three ways to do it.

If You Want AI Characters to Play With Now

Games with AI characters inside them: our list of games with AI NPCs you can talk to.
A whole game built around AI characters: that is an AI RPG. Our benchmark scores 27 of them on seven axes, from first-hand play.
What the research says about making AI characters stay in character and remember: our research index.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Convai? Convai is a platform for building AI characters that can hold spoken conversations, perceive their surroundings and carry out actions inside 3D worlds. Developers write a character’s backstory, knowledge and personality in the Convai Playground, then place it in a game or simulation with Convai’s Unreal Engine, Unity or web plugins. Its homepage calls it Conversational AI for Virtual Worlds.

Is Convai free? Convai has a free plan with 100 interactions a month, 60 minutes of cloud-rendered Avatar Studio and Convai Sim time, and one monthly active end user, according to its pricing page. That is enough to test the platform, not to ship a game. Its Unreal Engine plugin is open source under the Apache 2.0 license, but the characters still run on Convai’s service and count against your plan.

How much does Convai cost? On Convai’s pricing page, checked 27 September 2026, monthly billing is Free, Indie Dev at 29 dollars, Professional at 99 dollars, Scale at 499 dollars and Business at 1,199 dollars, with Enterprise priced on request. Yearly billing lowers them to 22, 69, 299 and 499 dollars a month. Each plan sets a monthly interaction quota and a limit on monthly active end users.

What was Convai’s part in the NVIDIA ACE demo? NVIDIA announced ACE for Games at Computex in May 2023 with a demo called Kairos, in which a player talks to Jin, the owner of a ramen shop. NVIDIA said it collaborated with Convai, an NVIDIA Inception startup, which integrated ACE modules into its real-time avatar platform to build the demo.

Does Convai have long-term memory? Yes, on paid plans. Convai’s documentation says long-term memory stores facts per player and per character. At the end of each session Convai extracts facts such as names, preferences and completed tasks from the transcript and injects them into the character’s context the next time that player connects. New facts are not stored during the conversation itself, and memory is never shared between characters.

Is Convai the same as Inworld AI? No. They are separate companies that both started out building AI game characters. Convai still sells a character platform with engine plugins. Inworld AI retired its Character Studio in 2025 and now sells mainly realtime text-to-speech, speech-to-text and AI infrastructure for consumer apps.

Sources

Checked 27 September 2026. Convai: homepage; pricing; documentation, including how long-term memory works and Narrative Design; blog posts “Introducing Convai” (20 August 2023), on the NVIDIA ACE demo (5 September 2023), the modding framework (18 March 2024) and its agentic platform (21 September 2025); Unreal Engine plugin on GitHub. NVIDIA: ACE for Games announcement (28 May 2023). Homepage history: Internet Archive captures of convai.com (March 2022 to January 2026).