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.