Tavus unveils Griffin, claiming the first video Turing test pass

Tavus wants you to second-guess your next video call. The San Francisco AI research lab unveiled Griffin on October 1, 2026, and says it is the first model to pass a video Turing test. In a live blind study, 48% of participants who chatted with a Griffin-powered system believed a human was on the other end. What Tavus actually built Tavus calls Griffin the world’s first Human Interaction Model, or HIM. Think of it less as a talking avatar and more as a full conversation partner that watches, listens, and responds in real time. Technically, Griffin is a full-duplex video-to-video system. Full-duplex means both sides can talk and react at once, the way people interrupt, nod, and overlap in a normal chat. Earlier systems tended to work more like walkie-talkies, where one side waits for the other to finish. The model pulls together perception, generation, movement, and conversational modeling into a single architecture. That matters because Tavus previously chained separate systems together: Phoenix handled rendering, while Raven handled perception. The numbers behind the claim The headline result comes from a blind study with 54 participants. Each person spent one minute on a video ca...