companies

Kyutai

Nonprofit AI research lab in Paris building and open-sourcing full-duplex speech and voice models, including Moshi and Kyutai TTS.

Kyutai was launched in November 2023 in Paris as a nonprofit, open-science AI research lab funded by the Iliad Group (founded by Xavier Niel), the CMA CGM shipping group (founded by Rodolphe Saade), and Eric Schmidt's Schmidt Futures, who together committed roughly 300 million euros over five years. The lab's founding scientific team, led by CEO Patrick Perez, previously of Valeo, includes researchers who came from Meta's FAIR lab and Google DeepMind's generative audio group, and it commits to releasing its research as open weights and open code rather than closed APIs. Kyutai's best-known output is Moshi, a 7-billion-parameter speech-text foundation model released in 2024 that supports full-duplex spoken dialogue, listening and speaking at the same time, the way real conversation works, with roughly 200ms latency, which the lab has positioned as an open alternative to closed real-time voice APIs. It followed with Kyutai TTS and Moshi STT, streaming text-to-speech and speech-to-text models, and Unmute, an open-source orchestration layer that wraps any text LLM with Kyutai's speech models to add voice input and output without retraining the underlying language model. The lab has grown to roughly 50 employees and distributes its models primarily through Hugging Face and GitHub under permissive licenses, positioning itself as a European counterweight to closed, US-based voice AI labs.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

Paris, France

Sector

lab