Nuance Research Fellow
Position Summary & Responsibilities
About Nuance Labs
Nuance Labs is building photorealistic, real-time AI avatars with emotional intelligence: a full-duplex audiovisual system that can listen, speak, react, interrupt, and respond like a real person.
We're a research company, with PhDs from MIT, UW, Oxford, CMU, and Johns Hopkins, and industry experience from Apple, Meta, Amazon AGI, and more. Backed by Accel, Lightspeed, South Park Commons, and NVIDIA, we combine frontier research with ruthless engineering needed for consumer-grade, real-time systems. The team is small, the work is real, and the problems are unsolved.
How Nuance Differentiates
Most conversational AI avatars today are hacks — a face slapped on a speech-to-speech pipeline, stuck in the uncanny valley: emotionless, mechanical, one-turn-at-a-time. Current systems take 2–5 seconds to respond; natural conversation requires sub-500ms. That's a 10x improvement, and it demands rethinking the entire stack.
That rethinking starts with full-duplex: an AI that listens and speaks simultaneously, perceives emotion in real time, and responds with a face that actually reflects it. It's an extremely hard problem, and we're developing foundation models designed for it from the ground up.
About the Role
The Nuance Research Fellowship is a 3-month engagement for early-career researchers who want to work at the frontier of Multimodal LLMs, generative modeling, and real-time audiovisual AI. The program is open to current PhD students (on internship, leave, or in their final stretch) and recent graduates from BS, MS, or PhD programs.
As a fellow, you’ll own a real research problem inside one of our core workstreams: pretraining, post-training, RL, evaluation, data, multimodal modeling, generative modeling, or inference. Depending on your strengths, this could mean training omni models from scratch, improving real-time audio-video-language reasoning, building evals for full-duplex interaction, or exploring model families such as flow matching and diffusion for controllable, high-fidelity generation.
This is designed as a mutual trial for a long-term role at Nuance, not a short standalone internship. At the end of three months, we’ll decide together whether to convert to a full-time Member of Technical Staff role. Fellows who convert step into MTS-level scope and ownership from day one.
What You’ll Own
Key Role Competencies & Evaluation Highlights
Evaluators scrutinize rapid product iteration, advanced AI/ML fluency, and the ability to build intuitive, user-centric conversational intelligence interfaces.
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