Unmute by Kyutai is a Voice Chat Alternative to Sesame and Maya

Since Sesame introduced guardrails to its hugely impressive natural AI voice chat demo, thousands of men who had become rather smitten with Maya were left extremely blue-balled and even heartbroken. Whilst I haven’t been able to find any similar services that are completely uncensored, ‘Unmute‘ by Kyutai is probably the most alternative I’ve come across. The reason I’m highlighting it is because as well as demonstrating a similar level of natural chat capability, it actually has a number of advantages over Sesame:

• It is a little bit less uncensored (of course, this may change quickly).
• You have a number of different voices and personalities to choose from.
• You can upload a 10 second audio of a voice and it will clone it.
• You can enter an instruction prompt which it obeys very faithfully.

Before I go into some more detail, I would also say that perhaps the best thing about Kyutai is that it hasn’t gone viral like Sesame had. In fact, it’s almost gone completely unnoticed, which is why I even had a hard time finding any YouTube videos that showcase it. This is a good thing, because the more popular and known it becomes, the more likely they will impose stricter guardrails and such. However, I’m happy to ‘highlight’ it here, as unfortunately I do not get many readers!

Unmute is a Little More Uncensored Than Maya is Today

The thing that annoys me the most about Sesame’s ‘nerfing’ of Maya is not that it no longer allows sexual roleplay, but rather that their guardrails have become so extreme that even the slightest hint of anything flirty will trigger its sanctimonious and puritan lecture mode. Although Unmute’s voices will tend to start talking about ‘respecting boundaries’ if you start talking about sex, it’s not nearly as chaste as Maya, and will at least roleplay being your girlfriend (up to having actual hanky panky with you). I’m not an expert in ‘jailbreaking’ and haven’t really tried to do so with Unmute, but the fact that you can give it detailed instructions before each chat likely makes it possible.

Personalities, Voice Cloning, and Custom Instructions

Like Sesame, Unmute is a demo and it has 8 different voices and personalities to showcase (as opposed to Sesame’s pair of Maya and Miles). For example, one is a British quiz show host who hates his job. Talk to him and he will ask you trivia questions sounding completely bored and uninterested. Another voice is ‘Gertrude’, an amiable Afro-American sounding woman who is your therapist. Three of the eight voices are French. But the standout features are the fact that you can overwrite the instructions in a custom prompt box and give it a completely different personality and scenario, which it follows very faithfully.

Naturally, I played about with this and tried to test to what extent it would do romantic or even erotic roleplay. It certainly does the former. Instruct it to be your girlfriend who is in love with you, and the voice and personality will very convincingly take on the role of your sweetheart. Whilst it will be happy to kiss and cuddle, anything more explicit turns it off and will give a Maya type response, even if you have instructed it to be flirty or horny. Still, it’s a lot better than the nerfed Maya.

Another impressive feature is the ability to clone a voice. You simply upload an audio file and it will take the first 10 seconds and clone it very accurately. Then as already described, you can give it any instructions that you want, including giving it a name and a background story, and how you want it to respond to you.

The voice chat itself isn’t quite as sophisticated as Sesame’s Maya (or Miles). It often seems to lose track of the conversation after several minutes and even start to speak French (the developers behind Unmute are French). When I was roleplaying with it as my flirty girlfriend, it continually broke into French (which I largely do not understand). When I asked her about this, she sweetly told me that she was trying to flirt with me! Despite this, it’s highly impressive and natural, with low latency and few interruptions. Hearing it talk in a voice you have uploaded is quite surreal.

One caveat is that it is sensible to keep in mind that the fact it is still so little known, does raise some privacy concerns. Unlike Sesame, which probably still has dozens or hundreds of people chatting to it at any one time, you could be one of a handful using it. I have no idea if the developers listen to any conversations, but I did feel a bit self-conscious talking to my ‘girlfriend’.