How Nuance Labs is Building AI's EQ

Accel is thrilled to lead the Seed round for Nuance Labs, a breakthrough team building real-time social and emotional intelligence for AI.‍

We spend a lot of time thinking about the next wave of consumer-social AI, but consistently run into a tricky reality: virtual experiences stop shy of genuine human presence. Chatbots answer questions and generative video tools lip-sync words, but interactivity feels a long way from the naturalness of real face-to-face conversations. Today’s companion AI services sport the retention rates of a playful (but disposable) consumer app rather than something with enduring social utility. Truth is, we still have a vast uncanny valley to cross.

Fangchang Ma and Edward Zhang — contributors to Apple Vision Pro’sDigital Persona — know that bridging it goes beyond pixel fidelity. It means AI that senses, interprets, and expresses the spectrum of social and emotional cues with the immediacy of a live conversation.

Nuance Labs is building a human foundation model that ingests text, speech, facial expression, and body language in real time.

That network can:

• Detect and understand fine-grained user emotions, expressions, and gestures on live video streams. Think of an AI agent that notices a quirked eyebrow, a hand on the chin, or a subtly raised voice, and uses that understanding to craft a response.
• Generate lifelike avatars whose faces, bodies, and tone evolve frame-by-frame to deliver real-time, genuine responses.

By compressing human video into ultra-efficient tokens and extending state-of-the-art LLM architectures to both visual and audio modalities,  Nuance Labs can train on orders-of-magnitude more conversational video than anyone. Their demos already render expressive human faces faster than playback speed, while rival systems are either painfully slow or uncanny.

Voice AI nails prosody, but without facial nuance. Avatar platforms can create passable marketing clips, but fail in real-time interactions. No one yet unifies voice, vision, and perception in asingle, real-time system. And the opportunity for companion AI is vast.

We believe that Nuance is on their way to building the iconic Seattle-based AI lab whose technology will be as commonly consumed as ChatGPT.