
A French artificial intelligence research lab backed by billionaire Xavier Neill has shown off a new voice assistant with a variety of human emotions that is similar to a product promised by OpenAI but delayed due to security concerns. .
Kyutai, an AI nonprofit group formed last year, unveiled its Moshi service at an event in Paris on Wednesday. Lab scientists said their system can communicate with 70 different emotions and styles. He showed the assistant advice to climb Mount Everest and recite a poem written with a thick French accent.
“It thinks what it says,” said Kyutai Chief Executive Officer Patrick Perez. “We believe Moshi has tremendous potential to transform the way we interact with and through machines.”
Assistant is the latest challenger to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the most popular chatbot. A growing number of startups and big tech companies, including Anthropic, Coheir and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, have rushed to introduce models to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4, even as some industry experts I am concerned. Risks Presented by Emerging Technologies.
One held by OpenAI in May Launch event Chat GPT Plus is a voice assistant for users that for the first time combines powerful image recognition capabilities with lightning-fast responses. The new product was supposed to be available within weeks, but the company later Delay rolled out until the fall and said it would not include the video and screen sharing features it initially demonstrated.
OpenAI also faced backlash for featuring an AI voice in its feature that sounded like actress Scarlett Johansson. The company called after the actress. Hired lawyers.
Perez said his lab will release the models and research behind Assistant as open-source technology, where the code is freely shared. He called Moshi “the first real-time voice AI assistant released.”
Kyutai said in a statement on Wednesday that the new service is an “experimental prototype”. A lab representative said the model and research will be available in the coming weeks, with no date set.
It was Kyotai. Started in November With €300 million ($324 million) in financing, including Neil, French billionaire Rudolph Saade and former Google chairman Eric Schmidt. Pérez, a former director of Valeo SA, has Google DeepMind and Meta Platforms Inc. for his lab. Hired researchers.
According to Neal, the voice assistant is a promising sign that Europe can become a global player in AI development. “Today all of their products are best in class worldwide. We are very happy to have it in Europe,” he said in an interview on Wednesday.
Kyutai’s Chief Science Officer Hervé Jégou briefly addressed safety concerns at the event. The lab will use indexing and watermarking tools to identify and track its AI-generated audio, he said.
To train his new model, Kyotai said he worked with a voice actress named Alice, without revealing her full name.