Hi HN! I'm Claudia, first employee and founding researcher at Nuance Labs. We're a research startup based in Seattle and have just released what we've been working on for the past 18 months.

Emma, a conversational audio-visual AI that you can have a video call with in real time. It might be a little rough around the edges but we think it's better than anything else out there (we're biased, of course). You don't need to make an account and it works from the browser with mic and optionally camera.

Emma is built on our full-duplex audio-visual system, Nuplex. We focused on naturalness over existing benchmarks as we found they didn't correlate well with what people actually like or how we speak face to face. We think being uniquely expressive is more important than an averaged-out face, for example. Our blog goes into more detail: https://research.nuancelabs.ai/

A beta developer API is available at https://platform.nuancelabs.ai/. We're taking safety very seriously so she may prematurely end the call, in particular for the API, but we're working on tuning that.

Personality, across all modalities, was the most important part for me. I've spent the longest speaking to her and I think she can be a lot of fun! I'd love for people to try it out and I look forward to hearing what you all think.

Thank you!

(Apologies for the double post, someone external posted our demo before we were ready, oops: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50429477)

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