Make Your Own AI Character With Voice and an API

Picture the character you spent months shaping: the sarcastic innkeeper, the detective with a past, the companion who remembers your bad days. Now picture hearing them speak, running a scene with three of their friends, and answering in your own Discord server.

Most character chat apps let you talk to a character. Very few let you take that character anywhere else. If you built yours on Character.AI, it lives on someone else's servers, behind someone else's rules, and right now behind someone else's bankruptcy auction.

We built Neocortex for game developers who need AI characters they fully control, and it turns out that is what a lot of character creators want too. On Neocortex you build an AI character in a visual editor, give it a preset or cloned voice, test it for free, 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.

Make your own AI character, node by node

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

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

Give it a voice

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 you have the rights to, 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.

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.

Put several characters in one scene

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.

Use it for tavern scenes, debates, found-family roleplay, or to test how a cast plays off each other. Group chat is marked experimental in the dashboard, where it works on every plan, and each character that speaks uses one credit. Running group chat from your own app over the API needs the Pro or Team plan.

Share it with a link

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.

Call it from your own code

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 (beta) 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, and where Conversation Flows move the story through checkpoints your game reacts to.
• A VR companion with voice and lip sync. We wrote about that in creating AI companions in Unity.

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

Keep ownership of what you make

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, we 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 weighing other apps too, read our guide to the best Character.AI alternative options in 2026.

Your first ten minutes

1. Create a free account and a new character.
2. Fill in the Agent, World and Personality nodes, and pick a preset voice.
3. Talk to the character in the editor until it sounds right. Test messages come from a free daily allowance, not your credits.
4. Click Share and send the link to a friend.
5. When you want it in your own game, bot or site, grab an API key and send your first request.

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

Frequently Asked Questions