Character Voice is a suite of features that allows users to hear Characters speaking to them in 1:1 chats, taking the Character.AI experience to the next level. It is the first step in the company's larger plan to build a multimodal interface, which will facilitate more seamless, intuitive, and engaging interactions.

Making a future where large language models enhance daily life, provide business productivity and entertainment, and help people with everything requires highly efficient inference. Character.AI designs its model architecture, inference stack, and product from the ground up to enable unique opportunities to optimize inference to be more efficient, cost-effective, and scalable. The company serves more than 20,000 inference queries per second. It is able to sustainably serve models at this scale because it has developed a number of key innovations across its serving stack. This blog post shares some of the techniques and optimizations Character.AI has developed.

Noam Shazeer, one of the authors of the original Transformer paper, is returning to Google after Character.AI licensed its tech for 2x the last funding valuation.