Sesame Maya & Miles: AI voices that 'think aloud' cross the uncanny valley
In one sentence Sesame (founded by former Oculus/Meta engineers) ships Maya and Miles, conversational voices with prosody, hesitations, and breaths so natural they trigger the 'feels like a real person' effect. Base CSM-1B model open Apache 2.0.
Sesame, a startup founded by ex-Oculus engineers, ships Maya and Miles: two AI voices for conversations that sound surprisingly real. Not only do they speak fluently, they breathe, hesitate, chuckle, say "uhm" and self-correct — the small human imperfections AI voices usually scrub.
Free to try on sesame.com, the effect goes viral fast: thousands of X/Reddit users say "I had the weirdest conversation, I forgot it was AI". Sesame names the problem the "uncanny valley of voice" — and claims to have crossed it.
In parallel they release CSM-1B, the base model in open source (Apache 2.0), so the community can experiment. Opens the new generation of voice AI where prosody quality matters more than single MOS benchmark numbers.
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Sesame
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Sesame Maya, Sesame Miles, CSM-1B
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