On October 1, 2026, AI startup Tavus released Griffin, a video AI model that holds face-to-face conversations in real time. It watches and listens continuously, nods while you speak, and works details from your screen into its response. In Tavus's own one-minute study with 54 participants, 48% said they believed they had spoken with a real person. Previous video AI models reached only 2.4% in similar tests. Griffin also scored 3.83 on NVIDIA's VideoFDB benchmark, close to the 3.92 human reference and well above the 2.80 scored by the next AI system. Tavus is limiting Griffin to trusted testers while it builds safety and disclosure features; a public release will come later.
What you can use it for
The legitimate applications are real: a tutor that reads a student's facial expressions and adjusts explanations in real time, a companion for an aging parent who lives alone, a first-pass customer service representative who escalates to a person when the issue gets complicated. If your clinic runs intake interviews, your agency conducts discovery calls, or your accounting office walks clients through tax questions, a lifelike video AI could handle the routine questions and hand off the nuanced cases to your team.
What to keep in your hands
The same realism that makes Griffin useful for tutoring makes it dangerous in the wrong context. Before your team takes any video call that matters — a signed contract, a hiring decision, a wire transfer, a sensitive client matter — verify the other side through a second channel. Send a text. Call the known number. Check a shared document only that person can edit. Do not accept a video call as proof of identity anymore. If you use a tool like Griffin yourself, disclose it every single time, in writing, before the call starts. The person on the other end has a right to know. And if you don't disclose and something goes wrong, the liability is yours, not Tavus's. The line is: always verify through a second channel, always disclose if you use it, never let a video face be the only proof.