3 ex-Apple researchers want to make AI less awkward. Lightspeed, Accel, and Nvidia are giving them $50 million to do it.

A startup that’s trying to make AI models better conversationalists with more emotional intelligence has just raised $50 million.

Seattle-based Nuance says it wants to build models that can hold face-to-face conversations without the lag and awkwardness of existing chatbots.

Fangchang Ma, Nuance’s cofounder and CEO, said that existing voicebots or AI avatars are built by duct-taping together voice-to-text generation, a large language model responding to those texts, and text-to-voice generation. This leads to a lot of latency and missing human nuances, such as reactions and microexpressions.

“If you use existing AI avatars, when they’re…