{"id":54162,"date":"2026-05-28T17:42:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T17:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/54162\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T17:42:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T17:42:09","slug":"sesame-the-conversational-ai-startup-from-oculus-founders-launches-its-ios-app","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/54162\/","title":{"rendered":"Sesame, the conversational AI startup from Oculus founders, launches its iOS app"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Thursday, the AI startup Sesame<\/a>, co-founded by Oculus\u2019s founders<\/a> and others from the VR company that sold to Meta<\/a>, released a public preview of the conversational AI agents it\u2019s been developing for over a year. With its new iOS app<\/a>, Sesame is rethinking the traditional AI chatbot experience popularized by apps like ChatGPT, creating one where conversation flows, even if the AI needs time to think.<\/p>\n

As the company explains in its launch announcement<\/a>, \u201cThere\u2019s an inherent tension between replying quickly and taking the time to compose thoughtful responses. A slower response is usually more correct, but it can also feel unnatural if it takes too long.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credits:Sesame<\/p>\n

To address this challenge, Sesame claims to have built fast search and retrieval systems, so the AI can have up-to-date information, as well as technology that allows it to run multiple parallel searches while speaking, weaving those results into its responses as it talks. That means the AI will talk more like a human, even pivoting mid-sentence if need be, as it taps into newer information \u2014 as a human might when remembering another key fact or point they want to add. <\/p>\n

The app offers four distinct AI agents called Maya, Miles, Simone, and Charlie, each of which have their own distinct voice, personality, point of view, and memory. Maya and Miles were previously available<\/a> in Sesame\u2019s Research Preview of its technology, where they were soon accessed by over a million people within the first few weeks, said Sesame investor Sequoia<\/a> at the time. (The company had then just raised its $250 million Series B from Sequoia and others, and was opening up a beta.) <\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credits:Sesame<\/p>\n

During the beta, Sesame learned from user feedback and rolled out features including search cards with image results for visualizing concepts, notes for capturing takeaways, a texting mode for those times when speaking aloud is not an option, and support for deep dives where you can get more in-depth results. There\u2019s also a new incognito mode for private conversations, which allows the agents access to prior context, but saves nothing to memory. <\/p>\n

The app, however, is only the first step towards Sesame\u2019s bigger plans for AI involving intelligent eyewear, which the team expects to launch in 2027. Before that, the agents will also learn to do more than just think with you, Sesame hints, suggesting they\u2019ll later be able to take action on your behalf \u2014 hence why they\u2019re called \u201cagents\u201d in the first place, instead of just chatbots.<\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credits:Sesame<\/p>\n

That is potentially even more interesting, as working with agentic tools or apps today requires being able to prompt for what you need and have a specific idea of what you want to happen, and sometimes, even how it should happen. A conversational agent that you could talk to naturally could help you take the next steps, without you having to perfect the command you\u2019re giving it. <\/p>\n

The iOS app<\/a> is out today in 39 countries, and the full experience is free for the time being. However, there still may be a short waitlist at sign-up. An Android preview<\/a> is coming in the future, the company says.<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Thursday, the AI startup Sesame, co-founded by Oculus\u2019s founders and others from the VR company that sold…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54163,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[24,405,8908,1125,7537,7129,31782],"class_list":["post-54162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-ai-apps","tag-apps","tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","tag-conversational-ai","tag-sesame"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}