[Nuance, Founded by Former Apple Researchers, Raises $50 Million to Develop High-Emotional-Intelligence Conversational AI Models] According to a report by Business Insider, as cited by Jinse Finance on September 14, 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 aiming to build AI models capable of face-to-face conversations with higher emotional intelligence, eliminating the delays and awkwardness of existing chatbots. Ma pointed out that current voice bots or AI avatars combine speech-to-text, large language models, and text-to-speech, resulting in high latency and a lack of subtle human-like responses. Nuance has decided to build a single model capable of handling audio and video inputs and outputs. Its training data cannot be scraped from the internet but must be collected internally or through partnerships with data providers. The data requires visible participants, clearly separated audio tracks, and natural, non-performative interactions.