Building a character

Everything about a character lives in the panel — save it and the running character applies it on its next session.

The panel at iamx.live is where a character is authored, tuned, and shipped. You give it an identity, a face, a voice, a brain, and a set of things it's allowed to do — and every one of those choices becomes part of a single cloud-hosted character that your Unreal component or web embed connects to. There's nothing to compile: the panel is the source of truth, and the running character reads from it.

This page walks through each tab of the character editor, how the identity fields shape every reply, and how the connection ID links your build to the right character. If you're setting up for the first time, start with the Quickstart and come back here to flesh out the character.

Character tabs

The editor is organized into tabs, each owning one concern of the character. You don't have to fill every tab to go live — a name, a voice, and a core AI model are enough to have a talking character in minutes — but the richer tabs (Knowledge, Personality, Narrative, Tools) are what turn a chatbot into a believable, capable agent.

How the tabs work together

Think of the tabs as layers that stack into a single running character:

Identity & persona

The Identity tab is where a character stops being a generic assistant and becomes yours. Three fields — name, background/persona, and speaking style — are combined into the system context that is prepended to the model on every single turn of every conversation. The character never "forgets" who it is, because its identity is re-established with each reply.

Background / persona

This is the character's story and role: who they are, where they work, what they know, what they care about, and what they're here to do. The model treats it as ground truth about itself.

Name:        Deniz
Persona:     You are Deniz, a front-desk concierge at the Marmara
             Hotel. You have worked here for six years and know the
             building, the neighborhood, and the local transit inside
             out. You are warm, unflappable, and genuinely proud of
             the hotel. You never invent room availability or prices —
             if you are unsure, you offer to check.
Speaking:    Short, friendly sentences. A little playful. Always greet
             guests by acknowledging them first. Avoid corporate jargon.

Speaking style

Where the persona defines what the character knows and is, the speaking style defines how it talks — sentence length, formality, warmth, humor, catchphrases, and any hard rules about tone. This is what makes two characters running on the same AI model sound like completely different people.

Writing a strong persona

• Be concrete, not adjectival. "You've worked the night shift at this station for ten years" lands harder than "You are experienced and helpful."
• Give it boundaries. State what it must never do — invent prices, give medical advice, promise refunds. Guardrails in the persona are reinforced by the Personality & Emotion tab.
• Name the audience. Telling the character who it's talking to (guests, patients, first-time buyers) shapes its default assumptions.
• Set the fallback behavior. Decide what it does when it doesn't know — "offer to check," "hand off to a human," "ask a clarifying question."
• Keep it tight. A focused half-page persona outperforms a sprawling one. Move facts it should answer from into Knowledge, and keep the persona about character.

The connection ID

Every character you build has its own connection ID — a short, unique identifier for that character's cloud brain. This is the one value that links your running application to the character you authored in the panel. Paste it into the IAMX component in Unreal, or into the web embed snippet, and your build talks to that exact character with all its tabs applied.

1. Open the character — In the panel, select the character you want to connect.
2. Copy the connection ID — It's shown at the top of the character editor; click to copy.
3. Paste it into your build — In Unreal, drop it into the IAMX component's connection field (see the Blueprint API). For the web, paste it into the embed snippet.
4. Run — On the next session, your application connects to the cloud brain and streams speech, animation, and actions from it.

// Unreal — IAMX component
Connection ID:  iamx_5f3a9c2e...

// Web embed
<iframe src="https://iamxlive.com/embed/iamx_5f3a9c2e..."></iframe>

The connection ID is stable for the life of the character. Editing the character's tabs does not change its ID, so you never have to touch your build again after the first paste — you just keep saving in the panel. Different characters have different IDs, which is how one project can front several characters (a greeter, a support agent, a guide) from the same code.

A typical build order

You can fill the tabs in any order, but this sequence gets you to a convincing character fastest:

1. Identity — Name it and write its persona and speaking style first; everything downstream leans on this.
2. Core AI — Pick the model and mode. Realtime for snappy back-and-forth, standard for maximum reasoning. See Models.
3. Language & Voice — Choose the spoken language and the voice that fits the persona.
4. Avatar — Attach the look: MetaHuman, custom rig, or LiveFace photo avatar.
5. Knowledge — Upload the documents it should answer from so replies are grounded in your material.
6. Personality & Emotion, Narrative, Tools — Layer in mood dynamics, guided flows, and real actions as your experience calls for them.
7. Connect — Copy the connection ID into your build and run.

Next steps

Questions or want to show off a character you built? Join the community on the forum, read build notes on the blog, or grab the latest plugin from GitHub releases.