Tavus unveils real-time video conversation model Griffin; nearly half of testers thought they were talking to a human, and access is limited to trusted testers
Tavus released Griffin-Lite, a research preview of Griffin, a real-time video conversation model that listens, watches and talks at the same time. The company says that in a one-minute video-call study, 26 of 54 participants (48%) thought they were talking to a real person; because it could be used to pass as human, it is open only to a small group of trusted testers and not to customers.
Tavus calls Griffin its first “Human Interaction Model,” combining real-time perception, decisions about when to speak, and expressive speech and video generation in one full-duplex, video-to-video system: it keeps listening and watching while the other person talks, can say “mm-hm” mid-sentence, stops the moment it is interrupted, and reacts to what it sees. Its speech component can clone a speaker’s voice from about 10 seconds of audio. The company says it is the first model to pass a real-time video Turing test.
In Tavus’s own tests, Griffin-Lite averaged about 0.43 seconds on H100s from receiving audio to showing its effect on screen, about half the next fastest published method; on the perception track of VideoFDB, a benchmark built by NVIDIA researchers, it scored 3.73 against a human reference of 4.20. These are the company’s own results.
In the human study, participants were told they would be matched with another participant for a video call; their partner was actually a digital human whose face, voice and replies were generated by Griffin-Lite. Under the same setup, Tavus’s older Phoenix-4.5 system convinced 1 of 41 people (2.4%). Tavus acknowledges the same abilities can make people believe they are not talking to AI, says further alignment and safety work is needed for a safe release, and is building safe-disclosure features. Griffin is not yet on the Tavus platform; a more capable version will follow once these issues are addressed.
Sources
- Griffin: The First Human Interaction Model | Tavus — www.tavus.io
- VideoFDB — The first benchmark for full-duplex audio-visual conversation — research.nvidia.com