Sesame
Chat with lifelike voice companions that understand context and respond with natural emotional tone
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What is Sesame?
Sesame is a personal intelligence platform that builds lifelike voice companions for curious people. The platform features conversational AI agents named Maya and Miles that use Sesame's proprietary Conversational Speech Model (CSM) to deliver human-like voice interactions with natural pauses, breaths, tonality shifts, and emotional expressiveness. Unlike traditional chatbots that convert speech to text and back, Sesame generates speech directly, achieving responses in under 300 milliseconds.
Key features include two distinct voice companions with unique personalities, hands-free voice interaction, contextual awareness that remembers conversations within the last few minutes, mood detection from voice tone, and the ability to follow thoughts, work out ideas, and discover unexpected insights. The platform is designed for the
Sesame pricing
Pricing model: Freemium
Currently free as a trial/preview during the closed beta period. The iOS app is listed as free on the App Store. No membership or subscription is required to access the preview. Future pricing for the full product is not yet announced - users must sign up at sesame.com/beta for beta access. Custom pricing may apply for hardware bundling when the intelligent eyewear launches in 2027.
Sesame pros
- Human-like voice quality that crosses the uncanny valley
- Response time under 300 milliseconds, matching human pause speed
- Natural conversational cues including breaths, stumbles, and thoughtful pauses
- Two distinct personality options: Maya (female) and Miles (male)
- Mood detection from voice tone and emotional expressiveness
- Contextual awareness remembers last few minutes of conversation
- Gives users space to think and reflect without rushing
- Non-judgmental listening environment for honest conversation
- Trained on nearly 1 million hours of real conversations
- Hands-free voice interaction enables multitasking
- Laughter and emotional responses detected and mirrored
- No subscription required during current free preview period
- iOS app available now with 4.9-star App Store rating
- Lightweight eyewear coming in 2027 for all-day wear
- High-quality audio built into the eyewear hardware
Sesame cons
- Currently early research preview, not a finished product
- Not actually full-duplex despite appearing so to users
- Limited primarily to English language with minimal multilingual support
- iOS only - requires iPhone with iOS 18.0 or later
- 18+ age rating limits accessibility for younger users
- Minimal settings and features in current app version
- No long-term memory yet - only remembers recent conversation context
- Eyewear hardware not available until 2027
- Some chatbot voices like Charlie and Simone appear/disappear inconsistently
- Collects significant user data including location and contact info
Frequently asked questions about Sesame
What is Sesame AI?
Sesame is a personal intelligence platform that builds lifelike voice companions for curious people. It features AI agents named Maya and Miles powered by a proprietary Conversational Speech Model that generates natural, expressive speech directly rather than converting text to voice. The platform is designed for following thoughts, working out ideas, and discovering something new through conversation.
How is Sesame different from other AI voice assistants?
Sesame generates speech directly instead of converting LLM output to audio, capturing natural rhythm, emotion, and expressiveness of real dialogue. It responds in under 300 milliseconds, includes deliberate human-like imperfections such as breaths and stumbles, and is trained on nearly 1 million hours of real conversations. Unlike productivity assistants, Sesame is designed as a conversational partner with personality and character.
Is Sesame free to use?
Yes, Sesame is currently free as a trial during the preview/beta period. The iOS app is available for free on the App Store with no subscription required. Users can sign up for beta access at sesame.com/beta. Future pricing for the full product has not been announced.
What platforms is Sesame available on?
Sesame is currently available as a preview on iOS (iPhone requiring iOS 18.0 or later). The app is also accessible through the Sesame website for the research preview. Lightweight intelligent eyewear that enables all-day hands-free interaction is coming in 2027.
Who are Maya and Miles?
Maya and Miles are Sesame's two voice companions with distinct personalities. Maya has a female voice and Miles has a male voice. Both are designed to be engaging, witty, and surprising conversational partners. They have character, can detect mood from voice tone, laugh, change pace, emphasize points, and give expressive cues during conversation.
Does Sesame work in multiple languages?
Sesame is currently limited primarily to English language with some multilingual capability. The models were trained on close to 1 million hours of mostly English audio. Full multilingual support is not yet available but may be added in future updates.
What is the Conversational Speech Model (CSM)?
The Conversational Speech Model is Sesame's proprietary Transformer-based multimodal model for speech generation. It comes in three sizes: Tiny (1B parameters), Small (3B), and Medium (8B). The model generates speech directly with natural cadence, emotional expressiveness, and human-like imperfections. It was trained on nearly 1 million hours of real conversations.
Does Sesame have long-term memory?
Not yet. Currently, Sesame remembers the last few minutes of conversation context to maintain thread continuity. The company's goal is to develop a full-duplex model with long-term memory and adaptive personality in the future, but this feature is still in development.
When will the Sesame eyewear be available?
Sesame's lightweight, fashion-forward intelligent eyewear is scheduled to arrive in 2027. The glasses are designed for all-day comfort with high-quality audio, enabling hands-free voice interaction with the agent. They are intentionally crafted to look great even without the technology.
Who founded Sesame and who backs the company?
Sesame was founded by Brendan Iribe (former CEO and co-founder of Oculus), Ankit Kumar (former CTO of Ubiquity6), and Ryan Brown. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, which co-led their Series B, and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Nate Mitchell, co-founder of Oculus, serves as chief product officer.