Make Your Own AI Character With Voice and an API

Most character chat apps let you talk to a character. Very few let you take that character anywhere else. If you spent months shaping a character on Character.AI, you know the feeling: the character lives on someone else's servers, behind someone else's rules, and right now behind someone else's bankruptcy auction.

I built Neocortex for game developers who need AI characters they fully control. It turns out that is exactly what a lot of character creators want too. This guide shows you how to make your own AI character with a real voice, put several characters in one conversation, share them with a link, and then plug the same character into a game, a website, or a Discord bot.

TL;DR: On Neocortex you build an AI character in a visual editor (backstory, world, personality, emotions, accent, knowledge), give it a preset or cloned voice, test it for free in the editor, share it with a public link, and call it from your own code through the Web API or a game engine SDK. The character is yours, and you can export it at any time.

How do you make your own AI character?

On Neocortex, a character is a small graph of nodes, and each node defines one part of who the character is. You don't need to write a giant prompt and hope the model follows it. You fill in the pieces and the platform keeps the character consistent.

The nodes you'll use most:

• Agent: the character's name and backstory. This is where the core of a Character.AI description goes.
• World: the setting or scenario the character lives in.
• Personality: one of 16 personality types, with a strength setting, so the character reacts in a consistent way.
• Emotion: the character's emotional baseline. Replies also report the character's current emotion, which games use to drive facial expressions.
• Language and accent: what language the character speaks, plus accents like British, Irish, Scottish, or Australian.
• Knowledge: upload text files with lore, history, or example lines the character can draw from.
• Vocabulary and reference: words the character should use, and people or places it should know about.
• Result: how long the replies are and how strictly the character stays on topic.

Want to bring a character over from Character.AI? I wrote a separate step-by-step guide that maps every c.ai field to these nodes: how to back up and move your Character.AI characters.

Can your AI character have a real voice?

Yes, and this is where Neocortex goes further than most chat apps. Every character has a voice node:

• 10 preset voices are available on every plan.
• Voice cloning: record or upload a short sample and Neocortex creates a custom voice from it.
• Voice design: describe the voice you want in words ("a tired old sea captain, gravelly and slow") and get a new voice without recording anything.

Custom voices are part of the Pro plan (5 custom voices) and the Team plan (20). Once a character has a voice, any app you connect can request spoken replies and stream them in real time, and speech-to-text lets people talk to the character too.

One honest note: the chat in the Neocortex dashboard is text-based today. Spoken conversations happen in the apps and games you connect through the API and SDKs, which is what the rest of this guide is about.

Can multiple AI characters talk to each other?

Yes. Group chat puts up to 6 of your characters in one scene, and you can join in as one of them. There are two modes:

1. Director mode: the AI runs the scene. Characters take turns reacting to each other for a few rounds, then hand the conversation back to you.
2. Manual mode: you decide who answers next, like a game master calling on players.

This is great for tavern scenes, debates, found-family roleplay, or testing how a cast of NPCs plays off each other. Group chat is marked experimental in the dashboard, and each character that speaks uses one credit.

How do you share an AI character with friends?

Open your character in the editor and click Share. Neocortex creates a public link that anyone can open and chat with, no account needed. You can revoke the link whenever you want.

Two things to know:

• Shared chats use your credits, so each plan has a daily cap per shared character to protect you from surprise bills.
• Shared chats are text-only, and the conversation resets when the visitor reloads the page.

Does Character.AI have an API? (And what to use instead)

Character.AI never offered a public developer API. Its own help center still says "We don't currently have an API". If you wanted your character inside your own Discord bot, website, or game, you were out of luck, or stuck with unofficial scrapers that broke every few weeks and went against its terms.

Neocortex was built API-first, because game studios need to call characters from their own code. The same character you build in the editor is available through:

• Web API: plain HTTP, works from any language or platform.
• Unity SDK and Unreal Engine SDK for 3D games and VR.
• Godot SDK and a React package for web apps.

Here's the whole thing in one request:

curl -X POST https://neocortex.link/api/v2/chat \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "characterId": "YOUR_CHARACTER_ID", "message": "Hello there!" }'

The response includes the character's reply, its current emotion, and a sessionId. Send that sessionId back with the next message and the character remembers the conversation. Older messages in long chats are summarized automatically, so the character keeps track of what happened without you managing any history yourself.

That one endpoint is enough to build:

• A Discord bot that speaks as your character in your server.
• A website chat widget for your fan community or your webcomic.
• A visual novel or RPG where your character is an actual NPC who can trigger in-game actions.
• A VR companion with voice and lip sync. I wrote about that in creating AI companions in Unity.

Full details are in the Web API post and the API reference.

Who owns the characters you make?

You do. Under the Neocortex Terms of Service, the content you create belongs to you, and you can export any character as a file at any time. After what is happening to Character.AI, I think that should be the minimum any platform offers.

What Neocortex is not, so you know what you're signing up for:

• It's a place to build characters, not to browse thousands of other people's bots. There's no public character gallery.
• There's no mobile app yet. The editor works best on a desktop browser.
• Users must be 16 or older, and adult content is not allowed.

If you're looking for a broader comparison with other apps, read my guide to the best Character.AI alternative options in 2026.

Neocortex is not affiliated with Character.AI or Character Technologies, Inc.

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