In a blog post yesterday titled "Crossing the Uncanny Valley of Conversational Voice," the company dropped a demo of its new AI chatbot that lets you talk to either "Maya" or "Miles." The goal, Sesame says, is to achieve something called "voice presence" or the "magical quality that makes spoken interactions feel real, understood, and valued."

Sesame AI’s voice assistant uses advanced speech technology to create natural, emotionally aware conversations that feel more human than ever.

Sesame has a mini white paper you can read on its website, describing the model and its dataset of around one million hours of “publicly available audio.” It says it plans to both open source its models, and expand from just English to over 20 languages “in the coming months.”

As a general rule, I'm not a huge fan of talking to AI. Even though many of them sound pretty human, they're still "off" enough that I much prefer typing when I want to converse with one. Sesame changed that.

In a way, we’ve always known this was the watershed moment for AI – when we actually start conversing with these digital entities, as if they were real people. In terms of Hollywood‘s exposition of real life,