3 ex-Apple researchers want to make AI less awkward. Lightspeed, Accel, and Nvidia are giving them $50 million to do it.
3 ex-Apple researchers want to make AI less awkward. Lightspeed, Accel, and Nvidia are giving them $50 million to do it.
摘要: Exclusive
3 ex-Apple researchers want to make AI less awkward. Lightspeed, Accel, and Nvidia are giving them $50 million to do it.
Shubhangi Goe
正文
Exclusive
3 ex-Apple researchers want to make AI less awkward. Lightspeed, Accel, and Nvidia are giving them $50 million to do it.
Shubhangi Goel
You're currently following this author!
Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email.
Nuance cofounders all worked at Apple before launching their startup.
2026-09-14T11:00:01.269Z
Read in app
Copy link
lighning bolt icon
An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt.
Impact Link
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider
subscribers.
Become an Insider
and start reading now.
Have an account?
.
A startup that's trying to make AI models better conversationalists with more emotional intelligence has just raised $50 million.
Seattle-based Nuance says it wants to build models that can hold
face-to-face conversations
without the lag and awkwardness of existing chatbots.
Fangchang Ma, Nuance's cofounder and CEO, said that existing voicebots or AI avatars are built by duct-taping together voice-to-text generation, a large language model responding to those texts, and text-to-voice generation. This leads to a lot of latency and
missing human
nuances, such as reactions and microexpressions.
"If you use existing AI avatars, when they're listening, they're not reacting, or they're just doing random things," Ma said.
Ma, and his two co-founders, all of whom are former researchers at Apple, wanted to build a long-term solution, even though it would be more technically challenging.
"We decided to build this on one system, on one model. There's audio video in and audio video out," Ma said.
Ma said that
the data needed to train
its models cannot be scraped from the internet and that it collects data in-house or from data partners.
"The perfect data for us will be, imagine the two of us having this conversation, we're having to record it," he said. "I want audiovisual from both sides. Both par