Soul Machines Alternative for Interactive AI Characters

Soul Machines, known for the digital human avatars brands used in customer service and marketing, went into receivership and has since been acquired by AppDirect. If you run a Soul Machines deployment, or had one on your roadmap, this is the moment to check your options.

This post covers what the acquisition means, a short continuity checklist for any character vendor, and how a Soul Machines alternative like Neocortex handles interactive characters for training, education and games.

What the AppDirect deal means

KPMG was appointed as receiver for Soul Machines and ran a sale of the business and its assets. The buyer, AppDirect, is a B2B subscription commerce platform. Its announcement says Soul Machines will operate as a standalone business within its portfolio, and that its avatar technology will be embedded in Devs.ai, AppDirect's platform for building business AI tools.

The audience is spelled out too: AppDirect's advisors and partners and the businesses they serve. The listed uses are customer support and self-service, learning and development, onboarding and training, employee help desks, and digital commerce. Games, interactive simulations built in an engine, and student-facing education products are not part of that list.

AppDirect says Soul Machines customers will gain access to its broader platform. What that means for contracts, pricing and the old product line is something to confirm with your account contact.

Five questions to ask any AI character vendor

A receivership is a reminder that the platform under your characters can change hands. Before you build on any vendor, including us, ask:

1. Can you get your characters out? Personality, knowledge and dialogue structure should live in a form you can rebuild elsewhere.
2. Who owns the face? If the avatar belongs to the vendor, a change of owner can change your character's appearance or availability.
3. Is pricing published? A public price list is easier to plan around than a negotiated contract that comes up for renewal under new owners.
4. Does it run in your engine or in theirs? An SDK inside your Unity, Unreal or Godot project keeps the experience in your build. A hosted embed keeps it on their servers.
5. Is there a self-hosting path? For regulated training or long-lived installations, running the platform on your own infrastructure removes a dependency.

We wrote more about this in our post on AI character vendor shutdowns.

Their avatars or yours

Soul Machines built its product around its own digital humans: a proprietary face and animation system that you configure, not a character model you bring. That gives a consistent look, and it also ties the look to the vendor.

Neocortex separates the brain from the body. You design the character's behaviour in our visual editor, and you keep the 3D model, rig and animation in your own engine project. Replies come back as lines with an emotion tag, so your animator can drive expressions with whatever facial setup your character already has. If you change vendors or models later, your avatar does not change.

This matters most for simulations and games. A training scene built in Unity or Unreal already has its own characters, lighting and art direction, and a vendor's face dropped into it rarely matches. Keeping the avatar in your project means the AI character inherits your art style, runs inside your build, and can act on the scene: the app sends nearby objects and recent events, and a reply can carry an action such as OPEN_DOOR with a targetId that your code executes.

Soul Machines alternative for training and education

Training is where many Soul Machines projects lived, so here is how a typical scenario maps onto Neocortex.

Take a customer-service onboarding simulation: a new hire talks to an upset customer, must follow the refund policy, and is assessed at the end.

• The customer is a character with an Agent node for the role, a Personality node for tone and an Emotion node that starts at "frustrated".
• The policy goes into a Knowledge node as a PDF, so the character can push back when the trainee gets a rule wrong.
• The script that must happen, such as greeting, identifying the order and offering the refund, becomes a Conversation Flow. The API returns checkpoint keywords (flowState) so your app knows which steps the trainee reached.
• The assessment uses the Quiz Evaluation Engine and API, available on the Team plan.
• Voice uses streaming speech-to-text and text-to-speech, with a cloned or designed voice for the customer.
• Several roles at once, such as a customer and a supervisor, can share one conversation through group chat on Pro and Team, up to six characters.

The same character runs in a Unity or Unreal scene, in a Godot (beta) project, or in a web app through our Web API.

Soul Machines vs Neocortex

Start with one scenario

Pick the one character your learners or players meet most often. Rebuild it in the Neocortex editor on the free plan, test it in the browser until it sounds right, and drop it into your engine or web app. Commercial deployments use Pro at EUR 29 a month or Team at EUR 99 a month with five seats, 20 custom voices and the quiz engine. If you are moving a larger deployment, contact us and we will help you plan it.

Soul Machines details come from public reporting, checked October 2026.

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