Emoti-Your Animated AI Avatar

Say Hello to Emoti!

Inspiration

We are a team of artists and animators who love bringing characters to life. When we first tried ElevenLabs’ voice AI, we were blown away. The tone, nuance, and pacing felt real, and it was expressive in a way that immediately sparked ideas. What if we could see the emotion already present in the voice through animation? That idea became Emoti, and creating a proof of concept on Bolt.new in just 20 minutes gave us the confidence to fully develop it.

What it does

Emoti is a lightweight web app that reacts in real time to AI speech, adding a visual presence that entertains, enhances connection, and brings conversations to life. The fully customizable nature of the system allows us to animate any character.

How we built it

We built Emoti entirely on Bolt.new—an incredible platform that made it possible for non-coders like us to build a working prototype. We integrated:

ElevenLabs Conversational AI API for responsive, natural dialogue
LLM-powered emotion detection tool to interpret the tone of each response (through ElevenLabs API)
Netlify integration was critical to us getting it out into the world. (Way out of our wheelhouse)
Lottie animations tied to different emotion states.
Figma for site design With this setup, we created a stylized animated face that reacts to each AI response like blinking, smiling, shifting expression, giving a layer of personality and entertainment to the already powerful voice interaction.

Challenges we ran into

As non-devs, we had to rethink how to translate animation logic into Bolt workflows. The discussion mode in Bolt really helped work through that! Syncing emotional interpretation with animation timing took experimentation. Lottie limitations forced us to be creative in expressing emotions clearly but efficiently.