Utsuwa — Open-Source AI Companion with 3D VRM Avatars
A vessel for AI to live in. Load a 3D avatar, give it a brain, and talk to a companion that speaks, listens, and remembers — entirely on your own machine.
Bring your own brain
Plug in any model. Use your own keys.
01 Presence
A real 3D body, not a chat box.
Drop in any VRM model and watch it come to life. Replies appear as 3D speech bubbles that follow your companion's head as it moves, breathes, and looks around.
02 Memory
She actually remembers.
Local AI embeddings weave your conversations into a web of memories she can recall by meaning, not keywords. Affection, trust, and mood shift over time across eight relationship stages — from Stranger to Soulmate.
03 Control
You own every part of it.
Run a frontier model or keep it fully offline with Ollama and LM Studio. Mix and match your chat, voice input, and text-to-speech providers — all on your own API keys, with nothing routed through us.
The whole kit
Everything packed into the vessel.
Desktop overlay
Pin your companion on top of everything with a transparent background, draggable anywhere, summoned by a global hotkey.
Talk, out loud
Speak with Groq Whisper or the Web Speech API and hear replies back through ElevenLabs or OpenAI voices.
Stays on your machine
Everything lives in IndexedDB on your device. No account, no cloud sync, no telemetry. Export and import whenever you want.
Alive, not idle
Idle motion, automatic blinking, mood-driven expressions and lip-sync that actually tracks what she is saying.
Yours to fork
MIT licensed and built on SvelteKit, Three.js and Tauri. Self-host it, rip it apart, send a PR.
Desktop and web
A native macOS app for the full experience, plus a web build that runs in any modern browser. Same companion, same save file.
Latest updates
Dev Log @2026.5.29
A quick update from CJ on where Utsuwa has been, what changed, and the roadmap for active development.
What Are VRM Models (And Where to Find Them)
VRM is the open standard for 3D avatars. Here's what it is, where to find free models, and how to make your own.
Starting the Project
Why I started building Utsuwa, an open-source VRM avatar companion as an alternative to closed platforms.