Voice AI that actually converts: New TTS model boosts sales 15% for major brands

Generating voices that are not only humanlike and nuanced but diverse continues to be a struggle in conversational AI. 

At the end of the day, people want to hear voices that sound like them or are at least natural, not just the 20th-century American broadcast standard. 

Startup Rime is tackling this challenge with Arcana text-to-speech (TTS), a new spoken language model that can quickly generate “infinite” new voices of varying genders, ages, demographics and languages just based on a simple text description of intended characteristics. 

The model has helped boost customer sales — for the likes of Domino’s and Wingstop — by 15%. 

“It’s one thing to have a really high-quality, life-like, real person-sounding model,” Lily Clifford, Rime CEO and co-founder, told VentureBeat. “It’s another to have a model that can not just create one voice, but infinite variability of voices along demographic lines ...