LiveAvatar Debugging Guide

Symptom-based troubleshooting for LiveAvatar integrations. Find your symptom below and follow the fix.

Avatar is silent / not responding to speech

Most likely: Missing context_id in FULL Mode.

Without a context_id, the avatar enters restricted mode — streams video but ignores user input. No error thrown.

Fix: Create a context via POST /v1/contexts with at least a prompt field. Include the returned context_id in your session token's avatar_persona.

Other causes:

• Browser mic permissions blocked (check allow="microphone" on iframe)
• Push-to-Talk enabled but PTT events not being sent
• OS-level mic mute

Audio is garbled or distorted (LITE Mode)

Most likely: Wrong audio format.

Required: PCM 16-bit signed, 24KHz, base64. No error returned for wrong format.

Checklist:

• Sample rate is exactly 24,000 Hz
• Raw PCM (no WAV/MP3/OGG headers)
• 16-bit signed, not 8-bit or 32-bit float
• Base64 encoded
• Chunks under 1MB

Quick test: Send a known-good 440Hz test tone. If it works but your TTS doesn't, resample your TTS output.

401 error / session fails to start

Most likely: Wrong auth header.

Endpoint	Correct auth
POST /v1/sessions/token	X-API-KEY: <api_key>
POST /v1/sessions/start	Authorization: Bearer <session_token>

Common mistakes: using API key on /start, using Bearer token on /token, putting API key in Bearer format.

Events not received (FULL Mode)

• Subscribed to correct topics? Send to agent-control, receive from agent-response
• LiveKit room connected? Check connection state
• Parsing JSON correctly? Events have event_type, event_id, session_id

WebSocket events silently dropped (LITE Mode)

Most likely: Sending before connected.

Wait for {"type": "session.state_updated", "state": "connected"} before sending any commands.

Also check:

• Using correct event names? LITE uses agent.*, not avatar.* (that's FULL)
• WebSocket still open? 5-min inactivity timeout

Session times out

5 minutes of inactivity kills the session.

• FULL: POST /v1/sessions/keep-alive with Bearer <session_token>
• LITE: {"type": "session.keep_alive", "event_id": "..."} via WebSocket

Send every 2-3 minutes.

Sandbox won't start

• is_sandbox: true set in session token
• Avatar ID is dd73ea75-1218-4ef3-92ce-606d5f7fbc0a (sessions) or 65f9e3c9-d48b-4118-b73a-4ae2e3cbb8f0 (embeds)
• Not using a different avatar with sandbox mode

~1 minute auto-termination is expected behavior.

Image avatar fails / no audio

Image avatars have no auto-generated voice. Specify voice_id in avatar_persona. Browse voices at GET /v1/voices.

Custom LLM / TTS not working

LLM checklist:

• Secret: secret_type: "LLM_API_KEY"
• Config: correct model, secret_id, base_url
• llm_configuration_id in session token
• Endpoint supports OpenAI /chat/completions protocol

TTS checklist:

• Secret: secret_type: "ELEVENLABS_API_KEY"
• Voice imported via POST /v1/voices/third_party
• Using the returned LiveAvatar voice_id (not the ElevenLabs ID)

CORS / network errors

• API calls should come from backend, not browser
• Allow outbound wss:// for LiveKit and WebSocket
• Allow *.livekit.cloud, api.liveavatar.com, embed.liveavatar.com

General approach

1. Start with sandbox mode to eliminate billing issues
2. Check session state: GET /v1/sessions/{id}
3. Check transcript: GET /v1/sessions/{id}/transcript
4. Check credits: GET /v1/users/credits
5. Verify you're not mixing FULL and LITE event systems