PlayAI, a voice AI platform advancing conversational AI, announced that it 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.
In connection with the announcement, Steve Jang of Kindred Ventures joined as a board observer. The company will also use the capital to invest in its generative AI voice models and voice agent platform and shorten the time businesses spend building human-quality speech experiences.
PlayAI 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. Built on hundreds of millions of conversations that represent real-world examples, PlayDialog offers a human-like conversation with a natural delivery and appropriate tone in real time. Users can create speech with PlayDialog through its editor, API, or via PlayNote. This tool transforms PDFs, text, videos, and other media into captivating stories, podcasts, briefings, and more in just minutes.
Enterprise and consumer applications are rapidly adopting generative AI-driven 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 helps developers create powerful voice applications without having to build their own models. The company utilizes 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 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.
Along with 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 also serves industries including healthcare, travel, hospitality, and retail and seamlessly integrates with many of today’s most popular business applications with a simple set-up within 20 minutes.
KEY QUOTES:
“Speech as an interface is exploding in popularity, and we knew it was a massive opportunity from the get-go. 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.”
– Mahmoud Felfel, Co-Founder and CEO of PlayAI
“We’ve been early big believers in the nascent and rapidly evolving generative media space. 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.”
– Steve Jang, Founder and Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures
“Voice AI represents a $2 trillion market, and at Race Capital, we thrive on partnering with founders who tackle big challenges in massive markets. 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.”
– Chris McCann, General Partner at Race Capital
“PlayAI’s text-to-speech models have been incredibly valuable to our Agentic Phone Rep. 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.”
– Keith Fearon, Head of Growth at 11x, customer of PlayAI
