Nuance Labs
Face-to-face AI interaction that feels human
About Nuance Labs
Nuance Labs is building photorealistic, real-time AI avatars with emotional intelligence: a full-duplex audiovisual system that can listen, speak, react, interrupt, and respond like a real person.
We're a research company, with PhDs from MIT, UW, Oxford, CMU, and Johns Hopkins, and industry experience from Apple, Meta, Amazon AGI, and Discord. The team is small, the work is real, and the problems are unsolved.
How Nuance Differentiates
Most conversational AI avatars today are hacks — a face slapped on a speech-to-speech pipeline, stuck in the uncanny valley: emotionless, mechanical, one-turn-at-a-time. Current systems take 2–5 seconds to respond; natural conversation requires sub-500ms. That's a 10x improvement, and it demands rethinking the entire stack.
That rethinking starts with full-duplex: an AI that listens and speaks simultaneously, perceives emotion in real time, and responds with a face that actually reflects it. It's an extremely hard problem, and we're developing foundation models designed for it from the ground up.
Benefits
- • Health: HSA plan with ~$2,000 in annual company contributions — roughly 2x what most big tech companies put in.
- • Time off: 15 days of PTO plus public holidays, and we close the office for a full week at year-end.
- • Food: Lunch, drinks, and snacks on us every workday — the small thing that quietly makes the day better.
- • Commuter benefits: We help cover the cost of getting to the office.
Open positions (1)
Company details
Funding
Total raised
$60M
Last stage
Series A
Investors
Founders
Fangchang Ma
PhD in Robotics and ML from MIT. Previously a research scientist and engineer at Apple, where he contributed to the Digital Persona feature on Apple Vision Pro. Also a former Fellow at South Park Commons.
LinkedIn
Edward Zhang
PhD from the University of Washington in Computer Graphics & Vision. Previously a research scientist at Apple, contributing to the Digital Persona on Apple Vision Pro.
LinkedInWhat happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.