A French AI lab has released a demo of a voice chatbot with practically immediate response times. OpenAI, the world's third most valuable start-up, has been teasing a similar feature for its own voice bot since mid-May.
The French chatbot, called 'Moshi' after how Japanese speakers answer the phone, is the first public release by Kyutai, a French non-profit lab founded by billionaires Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé and Eric Schmidt.
Researchers boasted response times of just 200 milliseconds, saying other available voice bots currently respond after a few seconds. When tested, Moshi sometimes responded immediately – even before the end of the question – and at other times took a few seconds to "think".
It also gave some curious answers, often heading down dead-ends where it would repeat the same sentence indefinitely.
Kyutai stressed that Moshi was a research prototype, not intended to provide perfect answers but meant to show off technology breakthroughs such as the bot's rapid response time, and its ability to replicate not just the meaning of sentences but different tones of voice as well.
To better understand how the AI chatbot is built and how it fits into a crowded market, Tech 24 talked to Kyutai researcher Neil Zeghidour and, of course, Moshi itself.
