10 FAQ answers as 15 second avatar clips: $27.60 on Sume standard

Ten FAQ answers as 15 second avatar clips cost $27.60 on Sume standard quality, $36.75 on plus and $82.50 on max, after a one-time $0.95 to create the avatar. That is 150 seconds of video at $0.184, $0.245 or $0.55 per second. A clip bank like this is the practical stand-in for a live conversational avatar while models such as Tavus Griffin-Lite are limited to select trusted testers.

Why 15 seconds

A 15 second answer is about 42 words at the 2.8 words per second Sume uses to plan clips. That is long enough for a direct answer and one next step, and short enough that people read the question, press play and leave with the answer. The job window is 4 to 60 seconds, so 15 is well inside it.

Write the answers as a list first. The first sentence should repeat the question in the viewer's words, because a clip is played out of context from a help page.

Building it

Create the avatar once from a prompt, props or a photo with POST /v1/avatar-1.0/generate and a handle such as faq_host. Wait for the job to complete. Then send ten talking-video requests with the same avatar_handle, each with its own Idempotency-Key, so a retry never creates a second paid job.

• Use the same aspect_ratio for all ten, 16:9 if they embed in a help page.
• Set quality explicitly on every request, because the default is plus.
• Store the job id, the handle and the approved script text per answer, so you can find which clip to redo when the answer changes.

What this does not do

A clip bank answers the questions you wrote. It does not listen, interrupt or adapt to a follow-up, and the avatar speaks English because the talking-video prompt allows no other language. When a question is not in the bank, send the visitor to text support rather than showing the nearest clip.

Changing one answer costs one clip. Re-rendering a 15 second answer on standard is 15 x 0.184 = $2.76.

Keeping the bank current

Answers go stale. Keep one row per clip: question, approved script, quality tier, job id, result URL and the date you last checked the answer. When a policy changes, find the rows that mention it and redo only those. If three of the ten change a quarter, the refresh cost on standard is 3 x 2.76 = $8.28.

Embed each clip next to its written answer, not instead of it. Search engines and screen readers need the text, and some visitors would rather read.