In September, Alexis Conneau left OpenAI, where he led the research team behind ChatGPT's voice feature that made for some unflattering headlines. One of the voices it produced bore a striking resemblance to that of actress Scarlett Johansson, who revealed that she had been asked to license her voice for the project and had refused.
Now, Conneau and his fellow cofounder, Coralie Lemaitre, an engineer turned business strategist, are making waves with his new venture, WaveForms, which emerged from stealth today backed by $40 million in seed funding from venture capital firm a16z. WaveForms aims to take Conneau’s audio AI efforts to the next level by using the power of AI voices to unlock what he calls emotional general intelligence, or EGI.
