Check out Sesame's conversational speech generation capabilities

There's been quite a bit of chatter around Sesame's conversational speech generation demo recently, with quite a lot of Reddit readers insisting this is something akin to the 'Her' movie moment in our collective AI journey.

On Thursday Anjney from VC Andreessen Horowitz posted an update outlining their investment in Sesame AI.

The Sesame team are working on developing two things:

1. A personal companion ("An ever-present brilliant friend and conversationalist, keeping you informed and organized, helping you be a better version of yourself.")
2. Lightweight eyewear ("Designed to be worn all day, giving you high-quality audio and convenient access to your companion who can observe the world alongside you.")

Here's the announcement Tweet from co-founder Justin Alvey:

But I think it's also worthwhile taking a look at this one here - the follow-up - to give you an idea of what their conversational speech model can do:

Listen to the 'woah' and other such pronouncements from 'Maya'. It is seriously impressive.

I checked out the Sesame demo using 'Maya' (they also have 'Miles') and spoke with her for about 5 minutes.

It was fascinating.

The team has clearly done a lot of work to drive a brilliant impression of reality. For example, lots of work on pauses, inflection and I even heard some mild stutter/corrections as she spoke ('h-hearing') that definitely brought the interaction to life.

This is absolutely one to watch.

Check the company out at www.sesame.com/ and do take a few moments to try out the demo in your Chrome browser.