PlayAI Secures $21 Million Revolutionize AI with Human-Like Voice Agents

PlayAI, a conversational AI company at the forefront, has raised $21 million in a Seed funding round led by Kindred Ventures and 500 Global, with participation from Race Capital, Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Pioneer Fund, TRAC, and others. In connection with this round, Steve Jang of Kindred Ventures will join the company’s board as an observer.

The newly acquired funding will support the company’s mission of further developing its generative AI voice models and agent platform, enabling businesses to easily build human-like voice experiences at scale.

In addition, the company has released a new version of its PlayDialog model, a multi-turn text-to-speech system that creates more natural and engaging conversations. PlayDialog uses contextual history from previous interactions to modify speech characteristics such as prosody, intonation, emotion, and pacing to make speech sound more human-like. The new model is trained over hundreds of millions of real-world conversations, which should enable it to render highly realistic, emotive speech in real-time. PlayDialog can be accessed through an editor, API, or PlayNote, a newly launched tool that helps users convert PDFs, videos, text, and more into insightful podcasts, stories, briefings, and much more in just minutes.

Mahmoud Felfel, Co-Founder and CEO of PlayAI talked about the rising popularity of speech interfaces: “Speech as an interface is exploding in popularity, and we recognized this huge opportunity early on,” Felfel said. “Developing voice agents that can autonomously perform complex tasks and converse like humans is no small feat. I am incredibly proud of what our team has built, and this funding will help us bring more powerful, emotive voice interfaces to applications everywhere.

The voice generation industry is growing exponentially: Market.Us predicts it will increase over fourfold in the following decade. Both consumer and enterprise segments have high adoption rates for generative AI-driven speech technology; this increases demand for applications that should instead provide human-like conversational capabilities way beyond the robotic voices of earlier generations. In the past, traditional voice technology was unable to produce natural speech because it lacked prosody-the must-have elements such as timing, rhythm, emphasis, and tone that make speech sound familiar and authentic.

On its platform, PlayAI allows developers to build their own advanced voice applications without having to create models from scratch. The suite of tools that the company offers comes in the form of utilizing custom large language models trained on an extensive dataset of human speech, specifically the podcast narration, storytelling, business conversation, and so much more. The platform supports various languages and accents. In terms of voice cloning technology, PlayAI ensures results that sound accurate and natural-sounding across different industries. With low-latency models available through text-to-speech APIs, developers can integrate PlayAI’s technology into both enterprise and consumer applications with ease.

PlayAI launched its new Play 3.0 mini model, a lightweight, low-latency version of the platform that supports more than 30 languages. This model is useful for healthcare, retail, travel, and hospitality industries. It can be integrated with popular business applications in just 20 minutes. Additionally, it has tools that enable users to create generative AI voice agents to use in customer support, appointment scheduling, and sales lead engagement.

Steve Jang, Founder and Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures, shared his enthusiasm for PlayAI’s potential: “We’ve been strong believers in the rapidly-evolving generative media space,” said Jang. “AI-powered voice generation is fundamentally transforming how businesses interact with customers, and we’re excited to support PlayAI in driving the development of this powerful technology.”

Chris McCann, General Partner at Race Capital, added, “Voice AI represents a massive $2 trillion market, and at Race Capital, we focus on partnering with founders tackling big challenges in expansive markets. PlayAI’s platform is a game-changer, unlocking new applications across customer service, sales, marketing, and more. We’re thrilled to join Mahmoud, Hammad, and the PlayAI team on this exciting journey.”

One customer, Keith Fearon, Head of Growth at 11x, praised PlayAI’s contributions to their operations: “PlayAI’s text-to-speech models have been a game-changer for our Agentic Phone Rep,” Fearon said. “Their voices sound natural and fluid in multiple languages, with ultra-low latency. The on-premise offering also ensures data security, making it a perfect fit for our needs.”

PlayAI, founded by Mahmoud Felfel and Hammad Syed, changes the way organizations deploy voice. The company has already served nearly 40,000 customers in multiple industries, offering advanced AI speech models and robust voice agent platforms. With this latest round of financing, PlayAI is poised to keep advancing voice AI into the next generation, delivering human-quality speech experiences that fuel engagement, improve customer interaction, and make workflows smoother.

source: businesswire