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

Nuance, a Seattle-based startup founded by three former Apple researchers, has raised $50 million to develop audiovisual AI models designed to make conversations with chatbots more natural. The company's cofounder and CEO, Fangchang Ma, said existing voicebots and AI avatars are assembled by combining voice-to-text generation, a large language model, and text-to-voice generation, which creates latency and omits human nuances such as reactions and microexpressions. Nuance aims to build AI chatbots capable of real-time reactions and human-like nuances. The funding round was led by Lightspeed, with participation from Accel, Nvidia's NVentures, and South Park Commons.

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