Wayne Liang is co-founder and chief innovation officer of HeyGen. His work connects interaction design with AI video and real-time avatars, focusing on how people express themselves and converse through generated media.[1][4]
Start with The guide to launch a real-time avatar agent →
X Career
Liang studied human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon. Before HeyGen he worked on design at Smule, where creating and presenting a performance required repeated takes. The founders’ account connects that experience to their interest in helping people share ideas without having to film a polished performance themselves.[2][1][5]
Contributions
Liang’s real-time avatar guide breaks a conversational interface into an avatar, a voice and a context containing its persona, knowledge and instructions. It shows how to combine those pieces and embed the result on a website. This is a product tutorial written by a founder; its examples demonstrate a setup process, not independent evidence that an avatar understands a business or answers every question correctly.[4]
Ideas
Liang treats presentation as part of the barrier to communication. A person may know what they want to say yet struggle to record it. HeyGen’s cofounder essay argues that an avatar can help separate those tasks. The value of that approach depends on the setting and whether the resulting interaction helps the audience.[5]
Tools, writing & talks
Writing, research & talks
Start here
The guide to launch a real-time avatar agentlinkedin.comA practical walkthrough of avatar selection, context, voice and website embedding.
Follow the four setup stages to understand the components before building a demo. No coding background is assumed; test the resulting agent against real questions rather than relying on the guide’s promotional claims.
Author[4]