How to Create AI Characters with HeyGen Avatar IV and ElevenLabs Voice Changer

AI-generated video is no longer just a technical demo — it’s a creative toolset for storytellers, educators, and content creators. With HeyGen’s Avatar IV, you can animate still images into lifelike characters. Paired with ElevenLabs Voice Changer, those characters gain professional-grade speech and personality.

Whether you’re building short films, voice-driven explainers, or anonymous avatars for YouTube, this workflow gives you studio-quality results — without a studio.

Here’s how we built the character shown in the demo:

Step 1: Upload your image to HeyGen

Start by heading to HeyGen and selecting Photo to Video under Avatar IV. Upload a high-resolution image of your character. Avatar IV will use this as the visual anchor—animating facial movements and syncing speech with remarkable fidelity.

Tip: Use images with clear lighting and neutral expressions for best results.

Step 2: Record a rough voiceover

Instead of using typed text or selecting a synthetic voice, we recorded a quick voiceover manually. This step gives you maximum creative flexibility — intonation, pacing, and emphasis all come from your original take.

But most creators aren’t voice actors. Even with a strong script, recordings can lack clarity, presence, or tone.

Step 3: Upgrade your voice with ElevenLabs

That’s where ElevenLabs comes in. Upload your voice recording to our Voice Changer, then choose from a library of natural-sounding voices — trained on professional-grade data and capable of preserving your original emotion and cadence.

In seconds, your rough recording becomes a polished voiceover that sounds like it was recorded in a sound booth.

This step isn’t just about polish — it’s about character. Voice shapes how your audience perceives the personality behind the image. Our voice library helps creators find the right match for their story.

Step 4: Sync audio with Avatar IV

Take the generated voiceover from ElevenLabs and upload it back into HeyGen. Click Generate, and Avatar IV will render the final video: your chosen image, brought to life with realistic facial animation and studio-quality speech.

The result is a fully-voiced AI character you can use in film, YouTube, education, or customer interaction scenarios.

Why it matters

This workflow makes high-fidelity character creation more accessible. You don’t need a green screen or a sound engineer. With just an image and your voice, you can now generate animated characters that speak naturally — ideal for storytelling, localization, or even creating private personas.

By combining HeyGen’s visual realism with ElevenLabs’ voice technology, we’re moving closer to a future where high-quality content can be produced by anyone, anywhere.