It’s time to bring emotional intelligence to AI.
Many companies are focused on building the smartest possible models, which is a crucial goal. There’s no shortage of use cases — AI for law, finance, or medicine, for example – that require the most intelligent models with the best reasoning skills.
But for other use cases, EQ is equally (if not more) important than IQ. To create the most immersive and human-like experiences, we need AI that truly feels like talking to a person. This includes giving AI a voice.
To that end, we couldn’t be more excited to announce our investment in WaveForms AI. The company is training an end-to-end audio language model with the goal of solving the speech Turing test — creating AI that feels indistinguishable from talking to a human.
This is different from today’s existing voice models, which typically require multiple steps: transcribing a user’s speech, generating a text response, and then running it through a text-to-speech model to respond. WaveForms’ new model processes audio natively, enabling more seamless and real-time interactions that fully capture the emotional nuance of a user’s voice and respond in kind.
We couldn’t imagine a better team to tackle this challenge. The company is led by CEO Alexis Conneau, one of the world’s leading audio and text LLM researchers and co-creator of OpenAI’s GPT4-o Advanced Voice Mode. Cofounder Coralie Lemaitre, a distinguished business strategy leader from Google, will drive product strategy and operations to bring the company’s vision to life.
WaveForms AI is hiring in San Francisco. If you’re excited about building emotional general intelligence (EGI), check out their website for open roles.
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Justine Moore is a partner on the consumer tech team at Andreessen Horowitz, where she focuses on AI companies.
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Marco Mascorro is a partner on the infrastructure team at Andreessen Horowitz, where he focuses on AI, infrastructure, open source software, and automation.
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Martin Casado is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm's $1.25 billion infrastructure practice.
