3 ex-Apple researchers want to make AI less awkward. Lightspeed, Accel, and Nvidia are giving them $50 million to do it.

Nuance cofounders all worked at Apple before launching their startup. Nuance Nuance has raised $50M to build an audiovisual to audiovisual AI model. Nuance wants to build AI chatbots with real-time reactions and human-like nuances. Lightspeed led the round, with participation from Accel, Nvidia's NVentures, and South Park Commons. 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.