0.8.0 — the receiver cushion is automatic

The freeze-free receiver buffer, everywhere and automatic

The avatar crosses the public internet, where a few percent of packet loss is normal. The browser's default shallow receiver buffer stalls on every lost packet; a 0.5s cushion recovers it before playout (measured at ~5% loss: ~11fps with multi-second freezes → a steady 25fps). Until now that cushion was applied only by AvatarVideoSurface, so a vanilla page — or a React page rendering the track itself — froze. Nobody embedding the SDK should have to know that knob exists.

• realtime-avatar/browser gains prepareAvatarRoom(room): one call after new Room(), before connect; every track the room subscribes gets the cushion, audio and video alike. Also exported: applyPlayoutDelay, applyAvatarPlayoutDelay, DEFAULT_AVATAR_PLAYOUT_DELAY_SECONDS. (#57, #58)
• attachRemoteAudio applies it for you, so the documented vanilla pattern is covered with no new line. playoutDelaySeconds: false opts out. (#58)
• RealtimeAvatarLiveKitRoom applies it room-wide to whatever you render inside it. playoutDelaySeconds={false} opts out. (#58)
• Demos: LiveKit is loaded on the first gesture instead of blocking every handler behind three CDN round trips, and every demo uses the one-liner. (#57)

A minor rather than a patch because the demos import the new surface; a copy of one needs this version or later. Nothing on /react or /react-native changes shape.

Also in this release line since 0.6.1: the 8,000-character instructions envelope (#49), MAX_SESSION_CLIPS following the platform to 20 clips / 8 idle (#50).

v0.3.0 — six packages become one, and the credential boundary becomes a build failure

Important

Not on npm yet. npm install realtime-avatar will 404 until 2026-08-27 10:32 UTC.
Every name was unpublished on 2026-08-26, and npm blocks a fully-unpublished name for 24
hours — no version number gets around it. The release pipeline is verified green and waiting;
this tag marks the code, not the registry state.

One package

npm install realtime-avatar gives you the whole SDK. realtime-avatar-react is gone — its
entries are now subpaths.

Import	What it is
realtime-avatar · /server	Server client. Holds your API key. 18.8 KB
/nextjs /hono /express /tanstack-start	Route adapters. Key-holding
/react /react-native	React and Expo bindings. Never hold a key
/browser /tools	Mic + playback, and the browser tool plane

realtime-avatar-mcp stays a separate name because it is a CLI you run with npx and never install.

The credential boundary is now a build failure

Importing a key-holding entry into a browser bundle throws at bundle time. The six server
subpaths carry browser and react-native export conditions pointing at a module whose only
statement is a throw.

Verified on the built package: a browser bundle importing both halves contains 0 occurrences
of Bearer or apiKey.

This replaced a naming convention with a mechanism. The previous shape rested on the claim that an
exports condition "chooses which file is bundled, never whether the package is" — measured on a
fixture, that is false.

Two traps, if you copy this pattern. "browser": null is worse than nothing: webpack errors,
but Vite 8 / rolldown ignores it and bundles the server file with the secret. And
"sideEffects": false lets a bundler treeshake a throw-only module away — the first version of
this guard measured as doing nothing until sideEffects was narrowed to name it.

Fixed

• Eight demo apps threw MODULE_NOT_FOUND at startup and the Next.js quickstart imported a
  package that 404s — they resolved npm names that had been unpublished.
• AvatarCall could not be used by anyone. It required client: RealtimeAvatarClient, a class
  the browser half deliberately does not export, so the prop named a type no consumer could
  produce. It now takes AvatarSessionClient, a five-method interface satisfiable by a plain object.
• Rule 5 of the agent contract told you to import a subpath that throws ERR_PACKAGE_PATH_NOT_EXPORTED.
• The published packages shipped with no README.

Types now derive from the published contract

spec/realtime-avatar.openapi.json is vendored from the live OpenAPI document and generated into
types that the public surface indexes into, so a contract change is a typecheck failure rather than
a silent divergence. npm run spec:check reports drift and exits 0 offline.

Internals

	before	after
Packages an app installs	6	1
Unreachable source files	1,230 lines	0 — now a build gate
tsup builds	7	1
npm run build	22.0s	7.9s
realtime-avatar/react exports	82	31

npm run reachable walks the real import graph and fails if any source file is reachable from
nothing. 24 LiveKit re-exports were removed — they are peer dependencies, so import them from
LiveKit and get the version you installed.

Known gap

shouldReplayPendingTurn is a documented predicate that nothing calls and nothing tests: a turn
sent while the session is reconnecting is not replayed today. Annotated rather than deleted.