I built an avatar component for a Grok Bot-like AI app, then realized it could also work as a standalone open-source project.

A developer has released Agent Robot Avatar, an open-source Web Component that provides an animated robot avatar for AI applications. Built with vanilla JavaScript and SVG, it is dependency-free and can be controlled via simple JavaScript calls to play states like waiting, success, and failure. The component is available on GitHub and npm under the MIT license.

I’m working on a small AI project that’s somewhat similar in spirit to Grok Bot. One of the first things I needed was a character/avatar, so I started there. After spending more time on the avatar than I expected, I realized it didn’t really need to stay tied to that project. So I pulled it out and turned it into Agent Robot Avatar, a standalone open-source component. The component itself is pretty simple: vanilla JavaScript + SVG, wrapped as a native Web Component. No runtime dependencies. You can drop it into a page: <agent-robot-avatar id="avatar" </agent-robot-avatar and control it from your app: avatar.play 'waiting' ; avatar.play 'success' ; avatar.play 'failure' ; There are also states for things like warning, inspect, blocked, error, sleep and wake. I wanted the avatar to handle only the visual side. It doesn’t know anything about your LLM, prompts, agent framework or backend. So whether you’re using OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, a local model, or something completely different doesn’t really matter. There are also a few interactions that aren’t controlled by the app: blinking, pointer following, small head movements, idle behavior, and a jelly-like deformation when you drag the head around. I kept it dependency-free partly because this is such a small UI element. Pulling in an animation framework just to make a little robot react to things felt unnecessary. Right now I can imagine using it for AI assistants, agent interfaces, desktop companions, or small AI pets. Demo: https://cx-artlab.github.io/agent-robot-avatar/?lang=en https://cx-artlab.github.io/agent-robot-avatar/?lang=en GitHub: https://github.com/CX-ArtLab/agent-robot-avatar https://github.com/CX-ArtLab/agent-robot-avatar It’s MIT licensed and also on npm: npm install agent-robot-avatar I’m still working on the original AI project, and I’m thinking about turning this avatar into a little AI pet next. If you have other weird or fun ideas for what it could be used for, let me know.