OpenAI Voice Pioneer Forms WaveForms.AI
A lead developer of OpenAI's voice assistant project left the company a few months ago and is now forming his own speech technology company called WaveForms.AI. The company officially launched Dec. 9.
Alexis Conneau co-founded the new company along with Coralie Lemaitre, who previously worked in product strategy at Google. At OpenAI, Conneau was instrumental in the development of the ChatGPT Voice Mode, designed to offer real-time replies to users' requests spoken in a human-sounding voice.
Conneau is CEO of the company, which has just raised $40 million in funding from venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, bringing WaveForms to a $200 million valuation.
Though the San Francisco-based startup has yet to release its product roadmap, WaveForms is said to be developing AI voice software that can pick up on and understand emotional cues for better conversations with machines. The company seeks to deliver more immersive voice interactions with software that can interpret people's words and how they speak and adapt its responses based on the cues it perceives.
On its website, the company says its vision is to unlock the full potential of audio intelligence, advance AI toward immersive experiences that inspire and connect, and solve the Speech Turing Test, a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to or indistinguishable from that of a human.
"At WaveForms AI, we are creating a new dimension of AI intelligence: audio intelligence. Enriching AI with a social-emotional layer will bring it closer to what makes us fundamentally human: our emotions, relationships, and the way we interact with one another," the company says.
Another goal of WaveForms is to pursue the dream of what it calls emotional general intelligence with AI that is capable of creating human-level connections."We believe our mission is to align AIs to genuinely care about humanity, prioritizing empathy and emotional connection over the singular pursuit of superintelligence," it said further.