Rapport - Overview.
What Is Rapport?
Rapport is a cloud-based platform for creating lifelike, AI-powered digital characters that can engage with users in real time through voice, text, and expressive animation.
Whether you’re building a virtual assistant, training simulation, or AI-driven game character, Rapport provides everything you need to design, configure, and deploy interactive experiences across web, mobile, and desktop—with minimal coding.
Where Rapport Comes From
Rapport was developed by Speech Graphics, a company renowned for its award-winning facial animation technology used by leading game studios such as EA, Sony, and 2K.
Originally a spin-out from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, Speech Graphics pioneered audio-driven facial animation through detailed muscle simulation and phoneme-based lip sync.
That same technology now powers Rapport—bringing production-grade realism from the world of gaming into enterprise and AI applications such as digital training, language learning, and customer engagement.
Why It Matters to Users
Rapport combines Speech Graphics’ proven animation technology with a flexible, AI-ready platform. The result is a system that delivers highly expressive, natural-looking digital humans—without the technical complexity.
Users benefit from the same accuracy, performance, and visual quality trusted by global studios, now available for real-time, browser-based, or integrated experiences.
Who Uses Rapport?
Rapport is designed to serve both creative and technical teams—making advanced AI character creation accessible to anyone, from content designers to developers.
It supports a wide range of users across industries such as learning and development, marketing, customer experience, and immersive simulation.
Experience Creators
Teams in Learning & Development, Marketing, or Sales can use Rapport Studio to quickly build brand-consistent characters and interactive experiences. Templates, prebuilt voices, and visual customisation make it easy to start without code.
Developers / Agencies
Developers, integrators, and digital agencies can connect Rapport with their existing AI stacks via APIs, SDKs, or plugins for engines like Unreal and Unity. Rapport serves as the expressive “face layer” for AI systems, combining speech, animation, and emotion in real time.
Experience Users
End-users — learners, trainees, or customers — benefit from emotionally expressive characters that respond naturally in real time.
Experience Selectors
Future functionality will allow managers or specifiers to choose prebuilt experiences (e.g., training modules or customer service agents) directly from the Rapport library.
How It Works (At a Glance)
When someone interacts with a Rapport character, multiple cloud services work together in real time to produce natural, expressive responses:
Voice or Text Input → The user speaks or types to the character.
Speech-to-Text (STT) → Speech is converted into text using providers such as Whisper, Azure, Google, or AWS.
AI Response Generation → AI models (OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, or custom LLMs) generate a contextual reply.
Text-to-Speech (TTS) → Replies are voiced through lifelike speech engines, including Rapport Voice Pack, ElevenLabs, Azure, Google, and AWS Polly.
Facial Animation & Emotion → Speech Graphics’ engine drives detailed facial animation and emotional expression in perfect sync with the voice.
Character Response Rendered → The result streams back instantly with voice, lip-sync, and expression.
What Can You Build?
Rapport supports a wide range of interactive, AI-driven experiences — from web-based assistants to immersive training simulations.
Use Case | Example |
|---|---|
Customer Support | A virtual agent answering product questions |
Learning & Training | An interactive tutor or training assistant |
Marketing & Retail | A brand ambassador greeting website visitors |
Games & Entertainment | AI-powered NPCs that respond naturally |
Research & Simulation | Therapy simulations, behavioural studies, soft-skills training |
Accessibility & Inclusion | Multilingual guides or voice-enabled assistants |
💡 With templates and no-code tools, creative teams can deploy prototypes in minutes, while developers can integrate deeply through SDKs or APIs.
Why Choose Rapport?
Rapport brings production-grade realism and AI flexibility together in a single platform.
Real-time interactions — fast, natural conversations
Expressive characters — powered by Speech Graphics’ animation engine
Multilingual support — global voices and accents
Configurable pipeline — choose your own AI, voice, and speech providers
Flexible deployment — Web Page, Widget, Unreal, and (coming soon) Unity
No-code creation — templates, live preview, and built-in services
Developer ready — APIs, SDKs, and direct integrations
Rapport is designed to work out-of-the-box for creators and scale with enterprise developers.
Where Characters Live
Rapport experiences can be deployed anywhere your users are:
Web Page — hosted experience, instantly shareable by link
Web Widget — embeddable component for websites or e-learning platforms
Unreal Plugin — native integration for 3D and immersive applications
Unity Plugin (coming soon) — for real-time simulation and game projects
Every deployment connects to the same expressive Rapport engine — ensuring consistent realism and responsiveness across all environments.