AI characters
Personalities viewers talk to in chat and through channel points, with a voice, a portrait and a spot on your stream where the words light up as they are spoken.
AI characters are in closed beta. The Characters tab appears on the Chat bot page once your channel is in it. Ask us on Discord if you would like to be.
An AI character is a personality you write, with a name viewers can talk to. Type !name what's the plan tonight or @Name any tips? in chat and it answers in character. Map a channel point reward to it and viewers can ask it things with points, and with TipPage+ it can speak the answer on your stream in one of your AI voices, next to its portrait, with the words lighting up as they are said.
Characters live on the Chat bot page under the Characters tab.
What’s included
One character is included on every channel: it listens in chat and answers in chat. TipPage+ adds:
- A voice - one of your AI voices or a standard voice, so the answer is spoken.
- On stream - the AI character overlay widget: portrait, speech bubble, captions timed to the voice.
- Channel points - a reward that talks to the character, with pictures and links in the message if you allow them.
- Viewer memory - the character remembers a few facts about regulars.
- Up to ten characters.
Making one
Hit Add character, give it a name and a personality. The personality is plain text in your own words: who it is, how it talks, what it cares about, what it never does. The platform rules always apply on top (nothing hateful, no sexual content, no personal details about real people), so a character can be as sharp as you like without putting your channel at risk.
The chat trigger is what viewers type after ! - it defaults to the name. Under In chat you pick how else it listens: @Name anywhere in a line (or a line starting Name,), and its name anywhere, so a plain “gerald is so grumpy today” gets an answer too. Any combination. Name-anywhere needs a name of at least three letters, and cooldowns still apply, so a character with a common name will not answer every line.
Add a portrait and it shows on stream beside what the character says. Pick a voice (TipPage+) and the answer is spoken.
Try it from the editor: type something in Try it and the saved personality answers. The reply is only shown to you - nothing goes to chat or the overlay and the character doesn’t remember it. To preview the widget, use the emulator in the overlay editor.
Its own Twitch account
With TipPage+ a character can reply from a Twitch account of its own, so chat sees its name and picture instead of TipPageBot. Make a Twitch account for the character, sign out of your own account in the browser, then hit Connect a Twitch account under Replies from and sign in as the character. It only grants TipPage permission to send chat as that account; TipPage never reads chat through it. One Twitch account can drive one character, and it cannot be your own streamer account or your custom bot account. Twitch only - on Kick every bot message comes from the TipPage account. Anything that account says in chat is ignored by the bot, so a character never answers itself.
Delivery tags
A character with an AI voice can perform as well as speak. Describe it in the personality, like “sighs a lot” or “often does a [nervous laugh] before answering”, and the reply carries square-bracket directions that the voice acts on. Laughing, sighing, whispering, shouting and the other built-in cues work, and so does anything short you describe in brackets. Directions go to the voice only. Chat and the on-stream captions show the words without them, and the captions are timed to the words.
In chat
- Who can talk to it - everyone, subscribers only, or moderators only. Mods always can.
- Cooldowns - per viewer and for everyone, in seconds.
- Daily limit - how many chat replies a day this character gives. There is also a platform-wide limit per viewer across every channel, so one person cannot use up everyone’s characters.
- Reply in chat / Appear on stream - one, the other, or both. A character can answer only on stream (no bot message at all), or only in chat.
Switch Listens in chat off and the character only answers channel point redemptions.
Channel points
On the Channel points page, turn on Talk to a character for a reward and pick the character. The redemption text is the question. Let TipPage create the reward makes it refundable: points come back when the message is blocked, a picture is rejected, or the character could not answer.
Under the character’s Channel points section you choose whether the reward’s answer goes to chat, to the stream, or both.
Pictures and links
Off by default. When switched on for a character, a link in the redemption text becomes:
- Pictures - Describe lets the character see the picture and react to it without showing it. Show also puts it on the widget next to the reply. Every picture is checked automatically before the character sees it, and by default it also waits on the Review page for a moderator - we recommend leaving that on. A refused picture refunds the points.
- Links - the character fetches the page and reads it (public https sites, text only).
Memory
Remember the conversation gives the character each viewer’s own conversation with it - their last dozen exchanges, kept for 90 days - so it picks up where that person left off, even weeks later. It also sees the last couple of things anyone else said to it in the past half hour, so it notices when a question was just asked, without mixing everyone’s conversations together.
Remember regular viewers (TipPage+) keeps a few short facts per viewer. Facts appear after a viewer’s first exchange and are refreshed every few exchanges; small talk like “hello” produces none, so a viewer can be listed with no facts yet. The character keeps facts per viewer - what they said about themselves, running jokes - for ninety days after they last talked to the character. Facts, never a transcript, never shared with other channels, and never something the character brings up unprompted; it is there so “you remember what I said about my dog?” gets a real answer. You can see and forget any viewer under the Memory section, or forget everyone.
On stream
Add the AI character widget to an overlay in the overlay editor. It stays hidden until a character answers, then shows the portrait, the character’s name, who asked, and the reply. Every setting is per widget:
- Captions - Karaoke shows the whole reply with the current word bigger and in your highlight colour; long replies scroll so the current line stays in view. Reveal shows each word only as it is spoken. Bubble shows the reply at once. None is portrait and voice only.
- Text, bubble, portrait, motion - font, size, colours, a shadow or an outline on the text (like the chat widget) or neither, speech-bubble style with its background down to fully transparent and its shadow off, portrait size and shape, where it sits, and how the widget enters and how long it holds after the last word.
A widget set to Any character shows whichever character answers on stream; pick one to give a character its own spot.
Standard voices come with exact word timings from the voice itself. AI voices are timed from the finished clip: TipPage transcribes it to find where each sentence starts and ends, listens for the pauses inside, and lays the words over the speech, so a word never lights up during a pause and a sentence never runs ahead of the voice. Only when neither is possible does the widget fall back to an estimate, and then it softens the highlight to colour only so a wrong word never jumps (you can turn that off).
Commands can speak as a character
A custom command with {ai:} in its response has a Speak as a character picker. The character’s personality, memory and on-stream setting take over, while the text before {ai:} still frames the question - handy for a command that always asks the character the same kind of thing.
Limits and costs
Characters share the channel’s AI budget with {ai:} commands (per minute by Twitch tier, and per day). Spoken replies have their own daily budget per channel. When a limit is hit the character quietly stops answering; a viewer inside their cooldown gets at most one “needs a breather” reply every ten minutes.