A French artificial intelligence research lab backed by billionaire Xavier Niel unveiled a brand new voice assistant with a wide range of human-like emotions, much like a product promised by OpenAI but delayed because of security concerns.
Kyutai, a nonprofit AI group founded last yr, unveiled its Moshi service at an event in Paris on Wednesday. The lab’s scientists said their system could speak with 70 different emotions and styles. They demonstrated the assistant offering advice on climbing Mount Everest and reciting a poem it had written in a thick French accent.
“It thinks as it speaks,” said Patrick Pérez, CEO of Kyutai. “We believe Moshi has enormous potential to change the way we communicate with and through machines.”
The assistant is the newest challenger to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the best-known chatbot. A growing variety of startups and Big Tech firms, including Anthropic, Cohere and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, have rushed to introduce models that may compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4, although some industry experts worry concerning the Driven presented by emerging technology.
OpenAI hosted a Kick-off event for a voice assistant for ChatGPT Plus users that for the primary time combined powerful image recognition capabilities with lightning-fast responses. The recent product was expected to be available inside a number of weeks, but the corporate delayed The launch is anticipated to happen by fall and it was explained that the video and screen sharing features demonstrated is not going to be included initially.
OpenAI was also criticized for featuring an AI voice in its feature that gave the impression of actress Scarlett Johansson. The company withdrew the voice after the actress employed lawyers.
Pérez said his lab will release the models and research behind the assistant as open-source technology, with the code freely shareable. He called Moshi the “first published real-time voice AI assistant.”
The recent service is an “experimental prototype,” Kyutai said in an announcement on Wednesday. A representative of the lab said the model and research can be available in the approaching weeks, but didn’t give a date.
Kyutai was launched in November with 300 million euros ($324 million) in funding, including from Niel, French billionaire Rodolphe Saadé and former Google chairman Eric Schmidt. Pérez, a former director of Valeo SA, hired researchers from Google DeepMind and Meta Platforms Inc. for his lab.
The voice assistant is a promising indicator that Europe is usually a global player in AI development, said Niel. “All the products they showed today are the best in their class worldwide,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “We are very happy to have this in Europe.”
Kyutai’s chief scientific officer, Hervé Jégou, briefly addressed security concerns on the event. The lab will use indexing and watermarking tools to discover and track audio generated by its AI, he said.
To train his recent model, Kyutai said he worked with a voice actress named Alice, but didn’t reveal her full name.
