Ruslan Synytsky is building RAVATAR for a world beyond the chatbox

Real-time AI avatars designed to speak, gesture and interact across websites, mobile devices, kiosks and holographic displaysFor most people, artificial intelligence still lives inside a box. You type, it answers. Ruslan Synytsky wants to move that experience beyond the chat window and give it a face, a voice and a body. From Limassol, RAVATAR founder and CEO Synytsky is building real-time AI avatars designed to speak, gesture and interact across websites, mobile devices, kiosks and holographic displays. The company is already using the technology in finance, healthcare, hospitality and museums, while developing systems that can operate through the cloud, on a single device or inside a closed network. For Synytsky, however, the bigger idea is not simply to make AI look more human. It is to change the way people interact with software altogether. Giving AI a face and a body That idea starts with what Synytsky sees as something still missing from most AI interaction. “Think about how you use AI today. You type a question and read the answer, or you speak and listen,” he said, adding that “It works, but the conversation is still incomplete, because you cannot see who you are talking to.” For RAVATAR, “A face and a body complete it”, with Synytsky saying “We believe AI avatars are the next interface.” What they add, he said, is “what words leave out”, with the avatars greeting users, gesturing and showing expression as they talk, while taking a moment to think before answering, “much as a person does”. That approach has already been tested publicly. At VivaTech 2025 in Paris, visitors talked to RAVATAR’s Leonardo da Vinci hologram, built with Capgemini and shown on its stand, asking him about everything from flying machines to modern AI. For Synytsky, “It earns its place wherever there is a conversation. It can assist, advise, host or guide.” When the wow factor becomes useful The harder question is what happens once the novelty wears off. Synytsky sees a clear difference between attracting attention and creating lasting value, saying “Novelty gets people to walk up. What matters is that they stay to talk, and that the customer keeps the avatar.” For him, “The business case is value.” That means creating “a digital expert trained on the customer’s brand” that can take different roles as assistant, adviser, host or guide and “does the job to the same high standard every time”. It also “takes the repetitive conversations off staff, so they can spend their time on the ones that need a person”. One example is Kristal, RAVATAR’s financial adviser at the AI Experience Centre in Luxembourg, who has worked daily since it opened in April, talking with visitors about wealth management. A hybrid future for enterprise AI As RAVATAR moves into different industries, where and how the technology operates becomes increasingly important. On whether enterprise AI is heading towards a hybrid rather than cloud-only future, Synytsky said “Yes, and the customer chooses.” Some want “the reach and scale of Google Cloud”, where Genesis is available through Marketplace, while others, including banks, hospitals and ministries, need “the conversation to stay inside their own walls”. “The same AI avatar platform serves both,” he said. RAVATAR was built “to work where the customer’s users are, not where its data centre is”, while its work with Intel allows speech recognition and language processing to run on a single device “with no cloud dependency required”. That includes offline setups, “like a kiosk that keeps working when the line drops”. Ultimately, Synytsky said, “Our vision is the same avatar wherever the customer needs it: in the cloud, on a single device, or inside a closed network.” RAVATAR’s host Anna When an AI looks convincingly human As avatars become more realistic, another question comes into play. How obvious should it be that there is no human being on the other side? For Synytsky, “It should be obvious throughout. At every point, people should know they are talking to an AI, not a human.” RAVATAR’s submission to Cyprus’ national AI strategy consultation proposed a national standard under which “Disclosure should stay visible for the whole interaction, not only at the start.” A real person’s face or voice, he said, “should never be copied without their explicit, documented and revocable consent”, while “there should be a clear route to a human at any time, without having to repeat the request”. Health, benefits and legal matters, he added, “would get the strictest rules”. Those standards would apply to RAVATAR too, with Synytsky saying “we still prefer a published standard to an unregulated market”. The company supports those rules and is already “implementing disclosure, human oversight and interaction logging in our own platform”. Where healthcare could matter most Those boundaries become particularly important in healthcare, the application Synytsky says he believes in most. “I see great potential in healthcare,” he said, pointing to shortages of clinicians across Europe and long waiting times. He sees room for an AI assistant that takes on “the repetitive tasks that don’t involve diagnosing”, starting with intake, appointment scheduling, general health information and guidance, and follow-up. Such an assistant, he said, could check in on patients “with warmth”, answer their questions at any hour and help train clinical staff, “so that nurses and doctors have more time for the patients who need them”. The limits, however, are clear. “It gives no medical advice, and diagnosis and treatment decisions stay with clinicians,” Synytsky said. Once it has completed an intake or follow-up, “it passes the information on to the clinic’s system or to the doctor, which saves everyone time”. RAVATAR first showed an AI healthcare assistant at a conference in Ancona ahead of the 2024 G7 Health Summit. Today, a global consumer-health company runs its avatar on its own devices, while RAVATAR continues to receive requests from the healthcare sector for use cases such as an AI patient assistant. Self-funded so far, but now raising As the technology finds applications across more sectors, RAVATAR is also entering a new stage as a company. “We’re self-funded so far. That kept us focused on what customers actually need,” Synytsky said, adding that “Our revenue is growing and the technology gets better every day.” Currently, almost all of RAVATAR’s clients are outside Cyprus, across the EU, the UK, the GCC and the United States. Synytsky also credited support from Cyprus, saying “I want to thank the Ministry of Energy, Commerce and Industry and its Export Helpdesk, and the Research and Innovation Foundation.” This year, at VivaTech 2026, RAVATAR joined the Cypriot stand organised by the ministry with Export Helpdesk support. The company is now preparing for its next phase. “The platform already works for our customers every day,” Synytsky said, adding that “To expand, we will keep enhancing the product and the technology, and we are raising now.” The type of investor matters too, with RAVATAR welcoming those who bring “more than capital: enterprise doors and help with expansion abroad”. Making home-grown AI normal That international reach also shapes Synytsky’s view of what Cyprus needs if it wants to move from being a consumer of AI to a creator of it. For him, “It becomes normal by being useful abroad.” “Every new project, every foreign client and every expo where we show the technology also promotes Cyprus as a European tech hub,” he said. To make that ordinary, companies need “a first local customer”, while “the intellectual property and the engineers need to stay here”. Cyprus, he added, has “real advantages, such as the IP Box regime and EU-aligned law”. Synytsky believes the opportunity remains open, saying “The field is still open, and Cyprus can get in before it is decided. A Cypriot company already offers real-time, interactive avatars.” What would help most, in his view, is “a public sector that is open to trying local technology early, with clear requirements such as voice access and several languages”. For Synytsky, “AI avatars are the next interface, and Cyprus can be one of the places that builds them.” Beyond customer service Some of RAVATAR’s deployments have also changed Synytsky’s own view of what the technology can actually become. “The deployment that surprised me most this year is the one for the artist Charles Fazzino,” he said. At the Elliott Museum in Florida, visitors ask a life-size digital Fazzino why he chose New York, about a hidden figure or about 40 years of hand-cut paper cityscapes, and “he answers in his own words”. At Pullman London, RAVATAR’s host Anna joined a dinner on the future of food and hospitality, where chef Jozef Youssef said he was “completely taken aback by how well Anna was able to formulate and articulate answers to even the most unexpected and unusual questions.” Meanwhile, at the LHoFT AI Experience Centre in Luxembourg, RAVATAR’s AI financial adviser Kristal talks with visitors about wealth management. Together, Synytsky said, those deployments showed him “that avatars go well beyond customer service”. “An avatar can carry a person’s knowledge and personality, so anyone can have a conversation with them,” he said, while commercially he would “still put healthcare first”, because “That is where the need for patience, availability and clarity is greatest.” Do people actually want AI to look human? That range of uses also raises a more fundamental question about how human AI avatars should actually feel. For Synytsky, the issue is realism and “does a lifelike face and manner matter to the person talking to it?” For RAVATAR, realism covers “the whole person: life-like gestures and body language, a natural voice and an engaging conversation.” “When those come together, people stop thinking about the technology and simply talk,” he said, adding that “It listens, looks at the person and answers in their own language. How far to push it follows the role.” Realism matters most “when the person is the point”. Visitors to the Elliott Museum want to see Charles Fazzino himself, while where trust matters, as with Kristal at the AI Experience Centre in Luxembourg, “the adviser has to feel credible, not like any particular person”. For Synytsky, the answer is to test rather than guess. “So we test with real users rather than assume.” When talking to software feels ordinary Five years from now, Synytsky expects AI avatars to feel much less novel than they do today. “AI avatars are here to stay, just like the web,” he said, adding that “They will be widely adopted across all major industries and will become a commodity.” In that future, “A face and a voice will be a normal way to use software, alongside typing and speaking.” Voice, presence and knowledge, he said, “will be one interaction, on a mobile phone, a kiosk in a hospital lobby, a service desk and a holographic display, not a window you type into.” For RAVATAR, success will come when that interaction stops feeling unusual altogether. Synytsky said “We will have succeeded when talking to software that has a face feels as ordinary as using the web”, while RAVATAR would “still be the interface layer underneath, running wherever the customer needs it.”