🚀 The realm of AI-generated voices has reached a level where it can efficiently produce audiobooks, podcasts, and even offer basic customer support. Yet, the hesitation among businesses to fully adopt this technology due to reliability concerns persists. Addressing this gap, Moin Nadeem and Nikhil Murthy, both MIT alumni with over seven years of friendship, launched Phonic. This innovative startup is on a mission to provide an end-to-end voice stack that significantly boosts synthetic voice reliability while cutting down on latency.
💡 Unlike other players in the voice AI space that stitch together disparate AI models, Phonic distinguishes itself by training its models in-house from start to finish. This unique approach not only ensures deeper integration of reliability features but also offers cost-efficient model hosting and running. Phonic’s models are trained on a diverse set of recordings, including accented and muffled speech, to achieve unparalleled robustness.
🔍 Currently collaborating with select partners in the insurance and healthcare sectors, Phonic is gearing up for a broader product launch in the coming months. Interested clients will soon have the opportunity to experience Phonic’s cutting-edge technology firsthand via its website.
💰 The startup has successfully secured $4 million in a seed funding round led by Lux, with notable contributions from industry luminaries such as Replit’s Amjad Masad and Hugging Face’s Clem Delangue. Grace Isford of Lux Capital highlighted the founders’ exceptional technical prowess and their novel approach to combining diffusion and proprietary models in the voice AI domain as key factors in their investment decision.
