Sesame, the conversational AI startup from Oculus founders, launches its iOS app

startup from Oculus founders, launches its iOS app">

On Thursday, Sesame, the AI startup co-founded by Oculus's founders and others from the VR company that sold to Meta, released a public preview of the conversational AI agents it's been developing for over a year. With its new iOS app, Sesame is rethinking the traditional AI chatbot experience popularized by apps like ChatGPT, creating one where conversation flows, even if the AI needs time to think. The company aims to strike a balance between speedy responses and thoughtful replies.

As Sesame explains in its launch announcement, "There's an inherent tension between replying quickly and taking the time to compose thoughtful responses. A slower response is usually more correct, but it can also feel unnatural if it takes too long." To address this challenge, Sesame claims to have built fast search and retrieval systems, enabling the AI to have up-to-date information, as well as technology that allows it to run multiple parallel searches while speaking, weaving those results into its responses as it talks. The app offers four distinct AI agents called Maya, Miles, Simone, and Charlie, each with their own distinct voice, personality, point of view, and memory.

Maya and Miles were previously available in Sesame's Research Preview of its technology, where they were accessed by over a million people within the first few weeks, said Sesame investor Sequoia at the time. The company had then just raised its $250 million Series B from Sequoia and others, and was opening up a beta. During the beta, Sesame learned from user feedback and rolled out features including search cards with image results for visualizing concepts, notes for capturing takeaways, a texting mode for those times when speaking aloud is not an option, and support for deep dives where you can get more in-depth results.

The app also includes a new incognito mode for private conversations, which allows the agents access to prior context, but saves nothing to memory. The iOS app is out today in 39 countries, and the full experience is free for the time being. However, there still may be a short waitlist at sign-up.

An Android preview is coming in the future, the company says. Sesame's bigger plans involve intelligent eyewear, expected to launch in 2027, and agents that can take action on behalf of users, not just provide information. The company's vision for the future of AI involves creating a more natural and intuitive experience, where users can interact with agents as they would with humans.

As Sesame continues to develop its technology, it aims to enable users to have seamless conversations with AI agents, without having to perfect commands or prompts. Sesame's iOS app is a significant step towards achieving this vision, and its release marks an exciting development in the field of conversational AI.