Sesame AI
Conversational-voice startup behind the viral Maya and Miles assistants, with an open-sourced Conversational Speech Model (CSM).
Overview
Sesame AI is a San Francisco voice-AI company building 'voice presence' — assistants that interrupt, laugh, and shift tone in real time. Its Maya and Miles demo went viral in February 2025, drawing over a million users and millions of conversation minutes early on. Sesame open-sourced its Conversational Speech Model (CSM-1B) under Apache 2.0 in March 2025, and is backed by a16z, Sequoia, Spark, and Matrix, with co-founder Brendan Iribe previously co-founding Oculus VR. It is distinct from the unrelated Maya Research LLM entry.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 24 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
ASEAN Perspective
Sesame AI in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
What this is for: Natural, emotionally expressive conversational speech — trying voice presence in a live demo or building on the open CSM speech model.
Who this is for: Consumers curious about lifelike voice AI, and developers wanting open speech-generation weights to self-host.
Availability: Free web demo; open CSM-1B checkpoint on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0. Larger checkpoints and a commercial API are not (yet) generally released.
What people say
Sesame's Maya and Miles demo was one of the most talked-about AI launches of early 2025, and the reaction split sharply. On the praise side, The Verge called it "the first voice assistant I've ever wanted to talk to more than once," Forbes covered the "promise of real AI voice," and Hacker News and Reddit threads ran to "jaw-dropping," with users citing the natural interruptions, laughter, breaths, and emotional inflection as a step past the usual robotic TTS.
The flip side is that the same realism unsettled many people. TechSpot's coverage—"excites and disturbs the internet"—captured the uncanny-valley reaction, and multiple write-ups described conversations that felt "creepy" precisely because Maya paused, hesitated, or laughed too warmly. Beyond the vibe, reviewers flagged a concrete risk: voice this convincing supercharges vishing, impersonation, and unhealthy parasocial attachment, and some users reported forming emotional bonds with a demo.
A grounding caveat on capability: Sesame open-sourced only the smaller CSM-1B checkpoint under Apache 2.0, and testers note the public open model is a step below the polished hosted demo. There's no general commercial API yet, so the eye-catching Maya experience isn't something developers can simply drop into their own products today.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Sesame AI's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Sesame AI unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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