Capital will fuel conversational voice AI startup bringing real-time agents and voice interfaces to businesses, developers and creators

Just-released model that uses a conversation’s historical context to facilitate natural, human-like conversational experiences

November 25, 2024 10:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–PlayAI, the voice AI platform powering the future of conversational AI, announced that it has raised a $21 million Seed round led by Kindred Ventures and 500 Global with participation from Race Capital, Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Pioneer Fund, TRAC, and others. As part of the announcement, Steve Jang of Kindred Ventures joined as a board observer. The company will use the capital to invest in its generative AI voice models, voice agent platform, and to shorten the time for businesses to build human-quality speech experiences.

“We’ve been early big believers in the nascent and rapidly-evolving generative media space”Post this

PlayAI also released a new version of its leading speech model, PlayDialog, a multi-turn Text-to-Speech model that uses a conversation’s historical context to control prosody, intonation, emotion and pacing to deliver more natural sounding speech. Trained on hundreds of millions of conversations that represent real-world examples, PlayDialog delivers human-like conversation with natural delivery and appropriate tone in real time. Users can create speech with PlayDialog through its editor, API, or via PlayNote, a just-launched tool that transforms PDFs, text, videos and other media into captivating stories, podcasts, briefings, and more in just minutes.

“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.”

The AI-powered voice generation industry is expected to grow more than fourfold over the next decade, according to a new Market.Us report. Both enterprise and consumer applications are rapidly adopting generative AI delivered speech capabilities to provide human-like conversational experiences that far surpass previous generations of voice technology. Previous generations of voice technology sounded unnatural because they lacked prosody – correct latency, pacing, emphasis and cadence of speech – the very qualities that make speech sound human and familiar.

PlayAI enables developers to create their own powerful voice applications without having to build their own model. The company uses custom large language models (LLMs) trained on an extensive dataset of diverse human speech, representing speech styles like podcasts, narrations, storytelling and business conversations with state-of-the-art voice cloning across multiple languages and accents. These powerful, low-latency models are accessible to every developer of enterprise and consumer applications through text-to-speech APIs.

In addition to its new PlayDialog model, PlayAI also offers Play 3.0 mini, a lighter weight low-latency model that supports 30+ languages and a voice agent platform that allows the rapid creation of generative AI voice agents for applications as diverse as 24/7 customer support, appointment scheduling and sales lead engagement. Play 3.0 mini serves industries including healthcare, travel, hospitality and retail, and seamlessly integrates with many of today’s most popular business applications with simple set-up within 20 minutes.

“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.”

“Voice AI represents a $2 trillion market, and at Race Capital, we thrive on partnering with founders who tackle big challenges in massive markets,” said Chris McCann, General Partner at Race Capital. “Play AI’s voice AI platform is the key to unlocking new applications across customer support, sales, marketing, and beyond. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Mahmoud, Hammad, and the PlayAI team on this journey.”

“PlayAI’s text-to-speech models have been incredibly valuable to our Agentic Phone Rep,” said Keith Fearon, Head of Growth at 11x, customer of PlayAI. “PlayAI’s models bring more natural, fluid sounding voices in multiple languages, and are delivered with ultra low latency. Their on-prem offering makes it a natural fit for our application, where data security is crucial.”

About PlayAI

Founded by Mahmoud Felfel and Hammad Syed, PlayAI builds AI speech models and an AI voice agent platform that allow developers and businesses to quickly build and deploy powerful voice applications, delivering value to customer support teams, sales departments, content creators, and other growing industries. PlayAI’s low-latency models lead the industry in voice cloning accuracy and natural human speech, and have served almost 40,000 customers. The company has financial backing from Kindred Ventures, Race Capital, 500 Global, and others.

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