On September 14, Business Insider reported exclusively that Seattle-based startup Nuance has completed a $50 million funding round, with investors including Lightspeed, Accel, and NVIDIA. The company was founded by three former Apple researchers, with co-founder and CEO Fangchang Ma leading the effort to create an AI model capable of face-to-face conversations with higher emotional intelligence, aiming to eliminate the delays and awkwardness present in current chatbots. Ma pointed out that existing voice robots or AI avatars are essentially a combination of speech-to-text, large language models, and text-to-speech, resulting in high latency and a lack of subtle human responses. Nuance has decided to build on a single model to achieve audio and video input and output. Its training data cannot be scraped from the internet and must be collected internally or through partnerships with data providers, requiring that both parties in the conversation are visible, with clearly separated and naturally non-performative audio tracks.