{"slug": "sesame-the-conversational-ai-startup-from-oculus-founders-launches-its-ios-app", "title": "Sesame, the conversational AI startup from Oculus founders, launches its iOS app", "summary": "Sesame, the conversational AI startup co-founded by Oculus founders, launched its iOS app on Thursday, offering a public preview of AI agents designed to speak more naturally by running parallel searches and weaving results into responses mid-sentence. The app features four distinct agents with unique voices and personalities, building on a beta that attracted over a million users after the company raised $250 million from Sequoia. The release marks a step toward Sesame's broader goal of integrating the technology into intelligent eyewear expected in 2027.", "body_md": "On Thursday, the AI startup [Sesame](https://www.sesame.com/), co-founded by [Oculus’s founders](https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/21/sesame-the-conversational-ai-startup-from-oculus-founders-raises-250m-and-launches-beta/) and others from the [VR company that sold to Meta](https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/21/facebooks-acquisition-of-oculus-closes-now-official/), released a public preview of the conversational AI agents it’s been developing for over a year. With its [new iOS app](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sesame-personal-agents/id6756329076), 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.\n\nAs the company explains in its launch [announcement](https://www.sesame.com/blog/voice-your-curiosity), “There’s 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.”\n\nTo 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 — as a human might when remembering another key fact or point they want to add.\n\nThe 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](https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/21/sesame-the-conversational-ai-startup-from-oculus-founders-raises-250m-and-launches-beta/) in Sesame’s Research Preview of its technology, where they were soon accessed by over a million people within the first few weeks, [said Sesame investor Sequoia](https://sequoiacap.com/article/partnering-with-sesame-a-new-era-for-voice/) at the time. (The company had then just raised its $250 million Series B from Sequoia and others, and was opening up a beta.)\n\nDuring 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’s also a new incognito mode for private conversations, which allows the agents access to prior context, but saves nothing to memory.\n\nThe app, however, is only the first step towards Sesame’s 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’ll later be able to take action on your behalf — hence why they’re called “agents” in the first place, instead of just chatbots.\n\nThat 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’re giving it.\n\nThe [iOS app](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sesame-personal-agents/id6756329076) 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](https://www.sesame.com/android-preview) is coming in the future, the company says.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sesame-the-conversational-ai-startup-from-oculus-founders-launches-its-ios-app", "canonical_source": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/sesame-the-conversational-ai-startup-from-oculus-founders-launches-its-ios-app/", "published_at": "2026-05-28 15:35:43+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-28 15:46:52.821783+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-startups", "ai-products", "ai-agents", "natural-language-processing"], "entities": ["Sesame", "Oculus", "Meta", "ChatGPT", "Sesame iOS app"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sesame-the-conversational-ai-startup-from-oculus-founders-launches-its-ios-app", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sesame-the-conversational-ai-startup-from-oculus-founders-launches-its-ios-app.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sesame-the-conversational-ai-startup-from-oculus-founders-launches-its-ios-app.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sesame-the-conversational-ai-startup-from-oculus-founders-launches-its-ios-app.jsonld"}}