Meituan's LongCat-Video-Avatar 1.5 turns one image plus one voice clip into lip-synced avatar video with 8-step distillation inference. Here is the hardware honest breakdown and when fal.ai beats self-hosting.
Why naive chatbots fail on Arabic, Spanish, and code-switched WhatsApp or voice traffic, and the engineering stack I use instead: detect, normalize, retrieve natively, reply natively, and score quality per language.
Wayne Liang paired a HeyGen avatar with an OpenClaw agent during paternity leave. Eight weeks, 2,741 prospect calls, 132 paid customers, and a handful of rogue pricing mistakes that only guardrails fixed.