Happy Monday, readers. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday weekend enjoying lots of good food and company (as well as taking advantage of any great deals you came across while doing some early Christmas shopping).
With that, let’s talk today about AI-powered voice generation.
The AI-powered voice generation industry is poised for explosive growth, with projections from Market.Us indicating a more than fourfold increase in market size over the next 10 years. This surge is fueled by the expanding adoption of generative AI.
While earlier systems offered rudimentary voice synthesis, they often sounded robotic and unnatural due to the lack of prosody – the subtle variations in pitch, timing and emphasis that make human speech sound fluid and expressive. These elements, encompassing latency, pacing, emphasis and cadence, are fundamental for creating a human-like conversational experience.
Incorporating GenAI (with a focus on prosody) means companies are developing voice technologies that deliver natural-sounding speech. This opens doors for a wide range of applications, both in the enterprise and consumer sectors. Businesses can use this technology for personalized customer service interactions, interactive training materials, or even engaging marketing campaigns. Consumers, on the other hand, benefit from AI-powered voice assistants with improved understanding and more natural interactions.
A company in the thick of this industry’s advancement is PlayAI. PlayAI enables developers to create their own powerful voice applications without having to build their own model. The company uses custom LLMs trained on an extensive dataset of diverse human speech that represents speech styles like podcasts, narrations, storytelling and business conversations with voice cloning across multiple languages and accents. These low-latency models are accessible to every developer of enterprise and consumer applications through text-to-speech APIs.
Recently, the voice AI platform powering the future of conversational AI boosted the industry by raising a $21 million Seed round led by Kindred Ventures and 500 Global. The company will use the capital to invest in its GenAI voice models, voice agent platform and to shorten the time for businesses to build human-quality speech experiences.
“Speech as an interface is exploding in popularity, and we knew it was a massive opportunity from the get-go," said Mahmoud Felfel, co-founder and CEO of PlayAI. "Building voice agents that can converse like humans and autonomously handle complex tasks is no easy feat, and I'm immensely proud of what our team has achieved. This funding will help us deliver our vision of powerful, emotive, and human-like voice interfaces for any application."
PlayAI also introduced PlayDialog. This advanced multi-turn text-to-speech (TTS) model taps into the conversational context to dynamically adjust prosody, intonation, emotion and pacing. Trained on a massive dataset of real-world conversations, PlayDialog excels at generating human-like dialogue with accurate tone and delivery in real-time. Users effortlessly create speech with PlayDialog through its user-friendly editor, API or by utilizing PlayNote, a newly introduced tool that effortlessly transforms diverse media formats like PDFs, text, videos and more into engaging stories, podcasts, briefings, and other captivating content.
The result is a highly realistic and natural-sounding speech.
PlayAI also offers Play 3.0 mini, a lightweight and low-latency model that supports 30+ languages. Additionally, their voice agent platform allows users to quickly develop GenAI voice agents for a wide range of applications, including 24/7 customer support, appointment scheduling and sales lead engagement. Play 3.0 mini caters to various industries, including healthcare, travel, hospitality and retail, easily integrating with popular business applications and simplifying setup to just 20 minutes.
PlayAI's text-to-speech models have been instrumental for its customers. For example, its models enhanced 11x's Agentic Phone Rep. These models deliver highly natural and fluid voices across multiple languages with exceptionally low latency. The on-premise deployment option aligns perfectly with 11x's stringent data security requirements.
“We’ve been early big believers in the nascent and rapidly-evolving generative media space,” said Steve Jang, founder and managing partner at Kindred Ventures. “AI voice generation platforms are fundamentally transforming how enterprise and consumer businesses are communicating with their customers, and we're proud to back PlayAI to further the development of their powerful mission.”
Funding participation also included Race Capital, Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Pioneer Fund, TRAC and others.
Be part of the discussion about the latest trends and developments in the Generative AI space at Generative AI Expo, taking place February 11-13, 2025, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Generative AI Expo covers the evolution of GenAI and will feature conversations focused on the potential for GenAI across industries; namely, how the technology is already being used to create new opportunities for businesses to improve operations, enhance customer experiences, and create new growth opportunities.
Edited by
Alex Passett
