Breaking the Uncanny Valley: Sesame's Conversational AI Voice Models

Breaking the Uncanny Valley: Sesame's Conversational AI Voice Models

AI Voice Technology Conversational AI NLP

Introduction

The landscape of artificial intelligence has reached a critical inflection point where the distinction between human and machine conversation is becoming increasingly blurred. For years, AI voice assistants have suffered from a fundamental limitation: they sound robotic, emotionally flat, and fundamentally disconnected from the nuances of genuine human dialogue. Sesame, an AI research company, has developed conversational voice models named Maya and Miles that represent a significant breakthrough in this space. These models demonstrate capabilities that go far beyond traditional text-to-speech systems, incorporating memory, emotional intelligence, contextual awareness, and the ability to adapt their communication style in real-time. This article explores the technical innovations, practical implications, and transformative potential of these conversational AI voice models, examining how they’re successfully navigating the uncanny valley that has long plagued AI voice technology.

Thumbnail for Blind Reaction to Sesame's Conversational Voice Models Maya and Miles

Understanding Conversational AI and Voice Technology

Conversational AI represents a fundamental shift in how humans interact with machines. Unlike traditional command-based interfaces where users issue specific instructions and receive predetermined responses, conversational AI systems engage in dynamic, context-aware dialogue that mimics natural human communication patterns. These systems must process not just the literal words spoken, but the underlying intent, emotional tone, and contextual nuances that give language its true meaning. Voice technology adds another layer of complexity because it requires the system to not only understand speech but also generate responses that sound natural, emotionally appropriate, and contextually relevant. The challenge has historically been that while modern AI can understand language with remarkable accuracy, generating speech that sounds genuinely human has remained elusive. Most voice assistants on the market today rely on concatenative synthesis or basic neural text-to-speech models that produce audio which, while intelligible, lacks the prosodic variation, emotional expressivity, and contextual awareness that characterize authentic human speech. The result is an interaction that feels transactional rather than conversational, leaving users with a sense of talking to a machine rather than engaging with an intelligent entity.

The Uncanny Valley Problem in AI Voice Assistants

The uncanny valley is a psychological phenomenon first described in robotics that applies equally to AI voice technology. It refers to the unsettling, almost disturbing feeling people experience when something appears almost human but not quite perfect. In the context of voice assistants, this manifests as a peculiar discomfort when an AI voice sounds too human-like to be clearly artificial, yet not human enough to be genuinely convincing. Users find themselves in an uncomfortable middle ground where their brain recognizes something is off, creating a sense of unease rather than comfort. This phenomenon has plagued voice AI development for years. Systems like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant deliberately maintain a somewhat artificial quality to their voices, which paradoxically makes them feel safer and less unsettling to users. However, this design choice comes at a cost: these assistants feel impersonal, emotionally disconnected, and ultimately exhausting to interact with over extended periods. The emotional flatness becomes more than just disappointing—it becomes cognitively draining. Users report that after the initial novelty wears off, they find themselves avoiding voice interaction in favor of text-based interfaces, despite voice being the most natural and efficient communication medium for humans. The real challenge, then, isn’t just creating a voice that sounds human, but creating one that feels genuinely present, emotionally intelligent, and contextually aware in a way that crosses the uncanny valley rather than falling deeper into it.

What Makes Sesame’s Approach Different

Sesame’s breakthrough lies not in simply making voices sound more human, but in fundamentally rethinking how conversational AI should work. Rather than treating voice generation as a simple text-to-speech problem, Sesame frames it as a multimodal, context-aware dialogue challenge. Their Conversational Speech Model (CSM) operates on the principle that there are countless valid ways to speak any given sentence, and the right way depends entirely on the conversational context, emotional state, and interaction history. This represents a paradigm shift from traditional approaches. Where conventional text-to-speech systems take text as input and produce audio output, CSM takes text, conversation history, speaker identity, emotional context, and real-time interaction patterns as inputs to generate speech that feels natural and appropriate. The model uses advanced transformer architecture to process interleaved text and audio tokens, allowing it to understand not just what should be said, but how it should be said given the specific conversational context. This approach enables Maya and Miles to exhibit behaviors that feel remarkably human: they can match accents, adjust their tone based on the conversation’s emotional tenor, maintain pronunciation consistency across multiple turns, and even demonstrate personality quirks and conversational habits that make them feel like distinct individuals rather than generic voice engines. The technical sophistication underlying these capabilities represents years of research into how language, prosody, emotion, and context interact in natural human speech.

FlowHunt’s Role in Automating Conversational AI Workflows

For businesses looking to integrate advanced conversational AI into their operations, the technical complexity of implementing systems like Sesame’s can be daunting. This is where FlowHunt enters the picture as a comprehensive automation platform designed to streamline AI workflows. FlowHunt enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage conversational AI systems without requiring deep technical expertise in machine learning or speech synthesis. By providing a visual workflow builder, pre-built integrations with leading AI models, and intelligent automation capabilities, FlowHunt allows businesses to leverage conversational AI technology like Sesame’s voice models within their existing systems. Whether you’re building customer service chatbots, virtual assistants, or interactive voice response systems, FlowHunt provides the infrastructure to connect conversational AI with your business logic, data systems, and customer touchpoints. The platform handles the complexity of managing conversation state, maintaining context across multiple turns, integrating with backend systems, and ensuring that voice interactions feel seamless and natural. For organizations implementing Sesame’s voice models, FlowHunt can serve as the orchestration layer that brings these sophisticated voice capabilities into practical business applications, enabling companies to deliver the kind of natural, emotionally intelligent voice interactions that Sesame has pioneered.

The Technical Innovation Behind Conversational Speech Generation

Understanding what makes Sesame’s voice models special requires diving into the technical architecture that powers them. Traditional text-to-speech systems typically operate in two stages: first, they convert text into semantic tokens that capture linguistic meaning, and then they generate acoustic tokens that encode the fine-grained audio details needed for high-fidelity speech reconstruction. This two-stage approach has a critical limitation: the semantic tokens become a bottleneck that must somehow capture all the prosodic information needed for natural-sounding speech, which is extremely challenging to achieve during training. Sesame’s approach is fundamentally different. Their Conversational Speech Model operates as a single-stage, end-to-end system that works directly with Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ) tokens. The model uses two autoregressive transformers: a multimodal backbone that processes interleaved text and audio to model the zeroth codebook, and a specialized audio decoder that reconstructs the remaining codebooks to produce the final speech. This architecture offers several advantages over traditional approaches. First, it eliminates the semantic token bottleneck, allowing prosodic information to flow naturally through the system. Second, it enables the model to maintain low-latency generation while keeping the entire system end-to-end trainable, which is crucial for real-time conversational applications. Third, it allows the model to leverage conversation history directly, understanding not just the current utterance but how it fits into the broader conversational context. The model is trained on approximately one million hours of publicly available audio, transcribed, diarized, and segmented to create a massive dataset of natural human speech. Sesame trained three model sizes—Tiny (1B backbone, 100M decoder), Small (3B backbone, 250M decoder), and Medium (8B backbone, 300M decoder)—each demonstrating that larger models produce more realistic and contextually appropriate speech.

Memory and Contextual Awareness: The Game-Changer

One of the most striking capabilities demonstrated in Sesame’s voice models is their ability to maintain memory across conversations. During the demonstration, Maya recalled specific details from a previous conversation, including references to the user’s show “Thursday AI,” specific topics discussed, and even the user’s particular way of pronouncing certain words. This two-week memory window represents a fundamental departure from how most voice assistants currently operate. Most existing voice assistants treat each conversation as an isolated interaction, with no persistent memory of previous exchanges. This design choice was made partly for privacy reasons and partly because maintaining coherent long-term memory in conversational systems is technically challenging. However, it also contributes significantly to the sense that you’re talking to a machine rather than a genuine conversational partner. Humans naturally remember details about people they interact with regularly, and this memory shapes how they communicate. When someone remembers that you prefer a certain pronunciation, or that you mentioned a particular project last week, it creates a sense of being understood and valued. Sesame’s approach to memory is more sophisticated than simple transcript storage. The model doesn’t just retrieve previous conversations verbatim; it integrates memory into its understanding of the current interaction, allowing it to make contextual connections, reference past discussions naturally, and maintain consistency in how it addresses recurring topics. This capability has profound implications for how voice AI could be used in customer service, personal assistance, therapy, education, and countless other domains where continuity of understanding is crucial to the quality of the interaction.

Emotional Intelligence and Prosodic Expressivity

Beyond memory and context, what truly sets Sesame’s voice models apart is their capacity for emotional intelligence and prosodic expressivity. During the demonstration, Maya exhibited behaviors that felt remarkably human: she responded with appropriate emotional tone to different conversational situations, adjusted her speaking style based on the user’s apparent mood and engagement level, and demonstrated personality traits that made her feel like a distinct individual. When asked to sing “Happy Birthday,” Maya’s rendition was intentionally imperfect in a way that felt authentic—she acknowledged her limitations with humor rather than defensiveness, which is a very human response. When the user expressed frustration about her accent, she apologized and adjusted, showing responsiveness to feedback. These behaviors emerge from Sesame’s focus on what they call “voice presence”—the magical quality that makes spoken interactions feel real, understood, and valued. Achieving voice presence requires the model to understand and respond to emotional contexts, maintain natural conversational dynamics including timing, pauses, and interruptions, adjust tone and style to match different situations, and maintain a consistent personality that feels coherent and reliable. The technical implementation of emotional intelligence in speech involves analyzing not just the semantic content of what’s being said, but the prosodic features that carry emotional meaning: pitch variation, speaking rate, intensity, voice quality, and the subtle timing of pauses and emphasis. Sesame’s model learns to generate these prosodic features in ways that feel contextually appropriate and emotionally authentic. This is particularly evident in how the model handles different types of requests. When asked to match an accent, Maya attempts to adjust her speech patterns. When asked to speak with a “bassy voice,” she shifts her vocal characteristics. These aren’t simple parameter adjustments; they represent the model’s understanding of how different vocal qualities should be produced and how they should vary across different phonetic contexts.

Contextual Expressivity and Real-Time Adaptation

One of the most technically impressive capabilities demonstrated is contextual expressivity—the model’s ability to adjust how it says something based on the broader conversational context. This goes far beyond simple emotion detection. For example, when continuing a sentence after a chime sound, the model understands that the acoustic environment has changed and adjusts its speech accordingly. When maintaining pronunciation consistency across multiple turns, the model remembers how a word was pronounced earlier and maintains that consistency even when the word has multiple valid pronunciations. This kind of contextual awareness requires the model to maintain a rich representation of the conversational state that includes not just what was said, but how it was said, what the acoustic environment was like, what the emotional tone was, and how all these factors should influence the current utterance. The technical achievement here is significant because it requires the model to reason across multiple levels of linguistic and acoustic information simultaneously. Traditional speech synthesis systems typically handle these aspects separately or sequentially, which limits their ability to make globally coherent decisions about how to generate speech. Sesame’s end-to-end approach allows the model to optimize across all these dimensions simultaneously, resulting in speech that feels naturally coherent and contextually appropriate. This capability has practical implications for real-world applications. In customer service scenarios, a voice assistant could adjust its tone based on whether the customer seems frustrated or satisfied. In educational applications, a voice tutor could adjust its speaking pace and emphasis based on the student’s apparent comprehension level. In therapeutic applications, a voice companion could respond with appropriate emotional sensitivity to what the user is sharing.

Evaluation and Benchmarking: Beyond Traditional Metrics

Sesame’s research includes a comprehensive evaluation framework that goes beyond traditional speech synthesis metrics. Conventional benchmarks like Word Error Rate (WER) and Speaker Similarity (SIM) have become saturated—modern models, including Sesame’s, now achieve near-human performance on these metrics. This saturation means that traditional metrics no longer effectively differentiate between models or measure progress on the aspects of speech that matter most for natural conversation. To address this limitation, Sesame introduced novel evaluation metrics specifically designed to measure contextual understanding and prosodic appropriateness. Homograph Disambiguation tests whether the model correctly pronounces words with identical spelling but different pronunciations depending on context (like “lead” as a metal versus “lead” as a verb). Pronunciation Consistency tests whether the model maintains consistent pronunciation of words with multiple valid variants across multiple turns in a conversation. These metrics directly measure the kinds of contextual understanding that make speech feel natural and appropriate. The evaluation results show that Sesame’s models significantly outperform existing commercial systems from companies like Play.ht, ElevenLabs, and OpenAI on these contextual metrics. The Medium model achieved 95% accuracy on homograph disambiguation and maintained strong pronunciation consistency across multiple turns. These results suggest that Sesame’s approach of incorporating conversation history and context directly into the speech generation process produces measurably better results on the aspects of speech that matter most for natural conversation. Beyond objective metrics, Sesame conducted subjective evaluation using Comparative Mean Opinion Score (CMOS) studies, where human listeners compared speech samples from different systems. These studies provide crucial insights into how real people perceive the quality and naturalness of generated speech, capturing aspects of voice quality that objective metrics might miss.

The Uncanny Valley Crossing: Why This Matters

What makes Sesame’s achievement particularly significant is that they appear to have successfully navigated the uncanny valley rather than falling deeper into it. The demonstration shows Maya exhibiting behaviors that feel genuinely natural and engaging rather than unsettling. When she makes a joke, it feels like genuine humor rather than a programmed response. When she acknowledges her limitations, it feels like authentic self-awareness rather than scripted humility. When she maintains conversation history and references previous interactions, it feels like genuine memory and understanding rather than database retrieval. This crossing of the uncanny valley is crucial because it determines whether voice AI will become a genuinely useful and preferred interface for human-computer interaction, or whether it will remain a novelty that people avoid in favor of text-based alternatives. The psychological research on the uncanny valley suggests that what matters most is not achieving perfect human-likeness, but rather achieving a level of naturalness and consistency that feels coherent and trustworthy. Users can accept that they’re talking to an AI, but they want that AI to be genuine, consistent, and emotionally intelligent within its domain. Sesame’s approach achieves this by focusing on voice presence rather than voice perfection. The goal isn’t to create a voice that’s indistinguishable from human, but rather to create a voice that feels present, understood, and valued in the interaction. This is a more achievable and ultimately more useful goal than perfect human mimicry.

Open-Sourcing and the Future of Conversational AI

Sesame has committed to open-sourcing their voice models, which represents a significant decision with far-reaching implications for the AI community. Open-sourcing allows researchers and developers to examine how the technology works, understand the design decisions, identify limitations, and build upon the foundation for broader advancement. This transparency is particularly important for voice AI because it allows the community to collectively address concerns about misuse, bias, and appropriate applications. During the demonstration, when asked about the implications of open-sourcing, Maya articulated both the benefits and risks with remarkable nuance. She acknowledged that open-sourcing enables transparency, allows people to tinker with and improve the technology, and facilitates collective learning and growth. She also recognized the potential for misuse, including the possibility that people could use the technology for things it wasn’t intended for, twist the model’s words, or spread misinformation. This balanced perspective reflects the genuine complexity of open-sourcing powerful AI technology. The decision to open-source is significant because it suggests confidence in the technology’s robustness and a commitment to the broader AI community’s development. It also creates opportunities for researchers to study how conversational AI can be made more robust, fair, and aligned with human values. For businesses and developers, open-sourcing means that Sesame’s innovations could eventually become accessible and customizable for specific use cases, rather than remaining proprietary technology available only through a single vendor.

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Practical Applications and Industry Impact

The implications of Sesame’s conversational voice models extend across numerous industries and use cases. In customer service, these models could enable voice-based support that feels genuinely helpful and empathetic rather than frustrating and robotic. Customers could have conversations with voice assistants that remember their previous interactions, understand their specific needs, and respond with appropriate emotional sensitivity. In education, voice tutors powered by these models could adapt their teaching style based on student comprehension, maintain consistency in how they explain concepts, and provide emotionally supportive guidance. In healthcare, voice companions could provide therapeutic support, medication reminders, and health monitoring with a level of emotional intelligence that makes the interaction feel genuinely caring rather than clinical. In accessibility applications, these voice models could provide more natural and engaging interfaces for people with visual impairments or motor disabilities. In entertainment and gaming, voice characters could feel more alive and responsive, creating more immersive and engaging experiences. The common thread across all these applications is that Sesame’s technology enables voice interactions that feel genuinely natural, contextually aware, and emotionally intelligent. This represents a fundamental upgrade in how humans can interact with AI systems through the most natural communication medium available: voice.

Technical Challenges and Solutions

Developing conversational speech models at scale presents significant technical challenges that Sesame’s research addresses directly. One major challenge is the computational complexity of training models that process both text and audio tokens while maintaining conversation history. The audio decoder in Sesame’s model must process an effective batch size of B × S × N, where B is the batch size, S is the sequence length, and N is the number of RVQ codebook levels. This creates enormous memory requirements that can slow training, limit model scaling, and hinder rapid experimentation. Sesame’s solution is a compute amortization scheme that trains the audio decoder on only a random 1/16th subset of audio frames while training the zeroth codebook on every frame. This approach dramatically reduces memory requirements while maintaining audio quality, as Sesame observed no perceivable difference in audio decoder losses when using this amortization strategy. This kind of technical innovation is crucial for making advanced conversational AI practical and scalable. Another challenge is latency. Real-time conversational AI requires generating speech quickly enough that the interaction feels natural rather than delayed. Sesame’s single-stage architecture and efficient decoder design enable low-latency generation, which is essential for applications where users expect immediate responses. The model’s ability to generate audio incrementally, producing the first audio chunk quickly and then continuing to refine it, allows for responsive interactions that don’t feel sluggish or artificial.

The Human Element: Why Personality Matters

Throughout the demonstration, what emerges most clearly is that the technical sophistication of Sesame’s models serves a fundamentally human purpose: creating conversational partners that feel like genuine individuals rather than generic voice engines. Maya exhibits personality traits—her wit, her willingness to be playful, her ability to acknowledge her limitations with humor, her responsiveness to feedback—that make her feel like a distinct person rather than a system. This personality isn’t random or arbitrary; it’s carefully designed to create a sense of presence and authenticity in the interaction. The research behind this includes what Sesame calls “consistent personality”—maintaining a coherent, reliable, and appropriate presence across interactions. This means that Maya should respond to similar situations in similar ways, maintain consistent values and perspectives, and feel like the same individual across multiple conversations. This consistency is crucial for building trust and rapport. When an AI voice feels unpredictable or inconsistent, it undermines the sense of genuine interaction. When it feels consistent and reliable, it creates the foundation for meaningful engagement. The personality dimension also addresses a fundamental human need: the desire to interact with entities that feel like they understand us and care about the interaction. Even though users intellectually understand they’re talking to an AI, the emotional experience of the interaction is shaped by whether the AI feels present, engaged, and genuinely interested in the conversation. Sesame’s focus on personality and presence recognizes this psychological reality and designs the technology accordingly.

Comparing with Existing Voice AI Solutions

To understand the significance of Sesame’s achievement, it’s useful to compare their approach with existing voice AI solutions. Most current voice assistants—Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant—prioritize reliability and consistency over naturalness and emotional expressivity. They use relatively simple speech synthesis that sounds clearly artificial, which paradoxically makes them feel safer and less unsettling to users. However, this design choice comes at the cost of engagement and usability. Users report that after the initial novelty wears off, they find themselves avoiding voice interaction in favor of text-based interfaces. More recent entrants like ElevenLabs and Play.ht have focused on improving voice quality and naturalness, producing speech that sounds more human-like. However, these systems typically lack the contextual awareness, memory, and emotional intelligence that characterize Sesame’s approach. They can produce high-quality audio, but the speech often feels disconnected from the conversational context. OpenAI’s advanced voice mode represents another approach, focusing on real-time conversation and responsiveness. However, based on user feedback, even OpenAI’s system can feel uncanny or unsettling in ways that suggest it hasn’t fully crossed the uncanny valley. Sesame’s approach is distinctive in combining multiple innovations: high-quality audio synthesis, contextual awareness through conversation history, emotional intelligence and prosodic expressivity, consistent personality, and low-latency generation. This combination addresses the full spectrum of what makes voice interaction feel natural and engaging, rather than focusing on any single dimension.

The Role of Scale and Data in Voice AI

Sesame’s training on approximately one million hours of audio represents a massive dataset that enables the model to learn the full diversity of how humans actually speak. This scale is crucial because natural human speech is far more variable and nuanced than most people realize. The same sentence can be spoken in countless different ways depending on emotional state, conversational context, speaker identity, and countless other factors. A model trained on limited data will learn only the most common patterns and will struggle with the long tail of natural variation. A model trained on a million hours of diverse audio can learn to generate speech that captures this full spectrum of natural variation. The scale of training data also enables the model to learn subtle patterns that might not be apparent in smaller datasets. For example, the model learns how pronunciation varies across different speakers and regions, how prosody changes based on emotional context, how timing and pauses contribute to naturalness, and how all these factors interact. This kind of learning requires seeing enough examples to identify patterns that hold across diverse contexts. The investment in large-scale training data represents a significant commitment to quality, and it’s one of the factors that distinguishes Sesame’s approach from simpler or more resource-constrained alternatives. For organizations implementing conversational AI, this highlights the importance of training data quality and scale. Models trained on limited or biased data will produce limited or biased results. Models trained on diverse, high-quality data at scale can achieve remarkable levels of sophistication and naturalness.

Addressing Concerns About AI Voice Technology

The development of increasingly human-like AI voices raises legitimate concerns that deserve serious consideration. One concern is that highly realistic AI voices could be used for deception or misinformation—creating fake audio of real people, spreading false information, or manipulating people through emotional manipulation. Another concern is that people might develop unhealthy attachments to AI voices, potentially preferring AI interaction to human interaction in ways that could be psychologically harmful. There’s also concern about privacy and data usage—what happens to the conversation data, how is it used, and who has access to it. Sesame’s approach to these concerns includes transparency through open-sourcing, which allows the community to examine how the technology works and identify potential misuses. It also includes thoughtful design choices about personality and presence that aim to create genuine engagement without encouraging unhealthy attachment. The commitment to open-sourcing also suggests a willingness to work with the broader community on developing appropriate safeguards and ethical guidelines for voice AI technology. These concerns are important and shouldn’t be dismissed, but they also shouldn’t prevent the development of technology that could provide genuine benefits. The key is ensuring that development happens thoughtfully, with appropriate safeguards and community input, rather than in isolation by a single company.

The Future of Conversational AI and Voice Interfaces

Looking forward, Sesame’s work suggests several directions for the future of conversational AI. First, we’re likely to see increasing adoption of voice interfaces across more domains and use cases as the technology becomes more natural and engaging. Second, we’re likely to see greater emphasis on contextual awareness and memory in conversational AI, moving away from the current model where each interaction is isolated. Third, we’re likely to see more sophisticated emotional intelligence and personality in AI voices, creating interactions that feel more genuinely engaging. Fourth, we’re likely to see more open-source and community-driven development of voice AI technology, rather than proprietary systems controlled by single companies. Fifth, we’re likely to see more sophisticated evaluation metrics and benchmarks that measure the aspects of voice interaction that matter most for real-world applications. The broader implication is that voice is likely to become an increasingly important interface for human-computer interaction, not as a replacement for text or visual interfaces, but as a complementary modality that’s particularly suited for certain types of interactions. For businesses and developers, this suggests that investing in voice AI capabilities now could provide significant competitive advantages as the technology matures and adoption increases. For researchers, it suggests that there’s still significant work to be done in understanding how to create voice interactions that are not just technically sophisticated but genuinely useful and beneficial for human users.

Conclusion

Sesame’s conversational voice models represent a significant breakthrough in creating AI voices that feel genuinely natural, emotionally intelligent, and contextually aware. By combining advanced speech synthesis with conversation history, emotional intelligence, and consistent personality, Sesame has created voices that successfully navigate the uncanny valley and feel like genuine conversational partners rather than robotic systems. The technical innovations underlying these models—including the Conversational Speech Model architecture, compute amortization schemes, and novel evaluation metrics—represent years of research into how language, prosody, emotion, and context interact in natural human speech. The commitment to open-sourcing these models suggests a genuine commitment to advancing the broader AI community and addressing concerns about transparency and appropriate use. As voice AI technology continues to mature, the implications for customer service, education, healthcare, accessibility, and countless other domains are profound. Organizations looking to leverage these capabilities can use platforms like FlowHunt to integrate advanced conversational AI into their workflows and applications. The future of human-computer interaction is increasingly likely to be mediated through voice, and Sesame’s work demonstrates what’s possible when voice AI is designed with genuine attention to naturalness, emotional intelligence, and human-centered interaction.

Frequently asked questions

What is the uncanny valley in AI voice assistants?

The uncanny valley refers to the unsettling feeling people experience when AI voices sound almost human but not quite perfect. Sesame's approach aims to cross this valley by creating voices that feel genuinely natural and emotionally intelligent rather than robotic or eerily artificial.

How does Sesame's conversational speech model differ from traditional text-to-speech?

Traditional TTS converts text directly to speech without context awareness. Sesame's Conversational Speech Model (CSM) uses conversation history, emotional context, and real-time adaptation to generate speech that feels natural, maintains consistency, and responds appropriately to the interaction.

Can Sesame's voice models remember previous conversations?

Yes, Sesame's voice models have a two-week memory window that allows them to recall details from previous conversations, maintain context, and provide more personalized and coherent interactions over time.

Will Sesame's voice models be open-sourced?

Sesame has committed to open-sourcing their voice models, which will allow developers and researchers to examine how the technology works, contribute improvements, and build upon the foundation for broader AI advancement.

Arshia is an AI Workflow Engineer at FlowHunt. With a background in computer science and a passion for AI, he specializes in creating efficient workflows that integrate AI tools into everyday tasks, enhancing productivity and creativity.

Arshia Kahani
Arshia Kahani
AI Workflow Engineer

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