HeyGen just open-sourced the whole stack. Fork it, swap the prompt, and you're live.

The AI avatar wall just came down. For the past two years, building a customer-facing AI avatar, the kind that listens, responds in real time, and can pull up a diagram or walk a customer through a product, has been firmly in "hire a team and spend six figures" territory. That changed this week. HeyGen open-sourced three working demo apps built on OpenAI's GPT-Live-1 and their LiveAvatar stack. A language tutor, a poker coach, and a customer support agent. Each one listens, speaks, and renders text or visuals on screen as it talks. The GitHub repo is public. The live demo is up today. If you've been watching this space and waiting for something you could actually build from without a computer science degree on staff, this is it. Fork one of the demos, change the system prompt to describe your business, and you have a working prototype. The sessions aren't free to run indefinitely (LiveAvatar bills separately), but the code to get you there is zero.

If you run an agency, content shop, or media business, this one's worth a plane ticket. The AMO Summit is October 20 and 21 at The Times Center in New York. One session, "What AI Lets Publishers Build Now," puts execs from People Inc. and Politico in the same room to talk about what's actually shipping, not what a researcher thinks might ship in three years. There's also a session specifically on marketing services in the LLM era, which is a more polite way of asking what happens to agencies when clients can generate a first draft, a brand identity, and a campaign brief before breakfast. Ticket prices go up after September 15.

Tools Worth a Look

LiveAvatar + GPT-Live-1 Open Source Demos: Fork a working AI avatar (language tutor, poker coach, or customer support agent) with real-time voice and on-screen visuals. Open source; LiveAvatar sessions billed separately. For any owner who wants a customer-facing AI avatar without starting from zero.

ScrapingBee Shopee API: Pull product titles, prices, variants, ratings, and seller data from Shopee Indonesia in a single request. For e-commerce operators and market researchers buying or selling into Southeast Asia. Pricing not specified.

Trending on GitHub

bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view: A real-time, browser-based globe that overlays live open-source satellite and spatial data on a photorealistic 3D map. Think of it as a spy satellite view, except the data is actually public. (1,762 stars today)

freestylefly/awesome-gpt-image-2: A growing library of 530+ prompts and 20+ production-grade templates for GPT Image 2 and 2.5, including a side-by-side comparison section showing what the same prompt produces across versions. (962 stars today)

alsk1992/CloddsBot: A self-hosted AI trading agent that watches 1,000+ markets (prediction markets, crypto exchanges, multiple blockchains), finds edges, executes trades, and manages risk on its own. Built on Claude. (277 stars today)

AlexsJones/llmfit: One command tells you which AI models will actually run on your current hardware, across hundreds of models and providers. Saves a lot of trial-and-error downloading. (258 stars today)

armory3d/armorpaint: Open-source 3D texture painting tools for graphics creation. (72 stars today)

Also Worth Knowing

Lovable now watches your live app and flags bugs it finds on its own, not just during the build, catching a real race-condition bug that was silently dropping consent checkboxes for logged-in buyers before any user reported it.

Inside SMB accelerator communities, a repeatable pattern is spreading: run a structured AI audit on a prospect's business, then turn the findings into a proposal, and it's becoming a standard client-acquisition move for agency owners and AI consultants.

One AAA Accelerator member cold-walked into a local business to book a meeting, and filmed the whole thing: worth watching if you do any in-person sales.

Michael Burcham on Substack: culture problems don't start with employees, they start with leadership decisions, and there are five specific levers owners actually control.

-Scott

SmartOwner is published (almost) daily by the team at DigitalTreehouse. Want AI consulting or automations for your business? Reply to this email.