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Emma, a real-time AI video persona from Nuance Labs

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Hi HN! I'm Claudia, first employee and founding researcher at Nuance Labs. We're a research startup based in Seattle and have just released what we've been working on for the past 18 months.Emma, a conversational audio-visual AI that you can have a video call with in real time. It might be a little rough around the edges but we think it's better than anything else out there (we're biased, of course). You don't need to make an account and it works from the browser with mic and optionally camera.Emma is built on our full-duplex audio-visual system, Nuplex. We focused on naturalness over existing benchmarks as we found they didn't correlate well with what people actually like or how we speak face to face. We think being uniquely expressive is more important than an averaged-out face, for example. Our blog goes into more detail: https://research.nuancelabs.ai/A beta developer API is available at https://platform.nuancelabs.ai/. We're taking safety very seriously so she may prematurely end the call, in particular for the API, but we're working on tuning that.Personality, across all modalities, was the most important part for me. I've spent the longest speaking to her and I think she can be a lot of fun! I'd love for people to try it out and I look forward to hearing what you all think.Thank you!(Apologies for the double post, someone external posted our demo before we were ready, oops: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50429477)

HN · launched Nov 9, 2026 · 9 upvotes (top 45%) · 0 views

Niche: ai video generation tools · 760 launches, 45 in the last 7 days ▼ -46% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Content generation
  • B2B
  • AI-native
  • Commercial product

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

No Emma is a real-time conversational audio-visual AI model, so a real version needs novel generative research, large-scale training data and compute, and low-latency inference infrastructure that vibe coding cannot provide.

What it would actually take: Reproducing it would require training or fine-tuning multimodal video and audio generation models, building a streaming inference stack with very low latency, and assembling large audio-visual datasets. This is frontier ML research and GPU infrastructure work.

Discussion

1 comment analyzed.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 242 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #105 of 243 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 375 days after the earliest competitor.

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