Voice.ai raises $6M and services like Midjourney and ChatGPT have advanced how AI creates graphics and text from text inputs. Audio may be the next frontier. Recent advances include word-prompted music production, language learning AI tutors, and voice simulators.
Voice.ai, which enables users change and hide their voices in real time, raised its first outside capital after early growth.
Voice.ai, with over 480,000 users and 50,000 voice filters, has raised $6 million to expand its voice-changing technology.
M13 and Mucker Capital lead. Voice.ai has self-funded $3 million and expanded by word of mouth, with a Discord channel of over 120,000 members.
The company’s tools—available as apps for Mac, PC, Android, and iOS—are being used by gamers, content creators, Vtubers, and others on TikTok, Zoom, Discord, Minecraft, GTA5, Fortnite, Valorant, League of Legends, Among Us, Skype, WhatsApp, and other platforms. The Voice.ai interface lets individuals create a new voice or choose from 50,000 pre-made voices (produced and shared by users like them) to use live or for recordings.
The cash will be used to acquire more technical talent, construct new SDKs and APIs for Meta, Unreal, and Unity, add multi-language support, and introduce voice-focused applications like singing.
The startup doesn’t mention it, but it will be fascinating if it uses some of the investment to enhance server capacity.
Related;Cloudflare launches Observability, a tool to beef up web monitoring
That’s heavy. Anecdotally, GPU discomfort limits the scaling of many AI programs. (That’s why huge transactions include strategics offering processing and server capacity.)
speech.ai uses a “virtual audio cable” to process and transmit your speech locally. However, reviews of its apps complain that when you sign up, you’re put on a waitlist because “overwhelming demand has our servers at max capacity” and promised to be notified when the service raises capacity.
Voice.ai raises $6M as hundreds of speech-to-voice and voice-to-speech services are active: Spotify bought Sonantic last year, Snap bought an AI voice assistant earlier, Sanas changes your accent, Murf and Acapela simulate voices, and others. Voice.ai, like Respeecher and ElevenLabs, a pair of voice-to-voice AI firms, lets users apply masks to alter or replace their voices.
Respeecher, a Ukrainian company, created a new Darth Vader voice for new Star Wars films based on James Earl Jones’s 45-year-old performance. As Russia invaded Ukraine, Darth’s voice was sent to the Hollywood client from Ukraine.
ElevenLabs, famous (or infamous) for its voice-cloning technology, raised $19 million from big-name investors earlier this month.
Voice.ai wants to be the AI voice-modifying app for everyone.
“There are plenty of companies that are trying to provide a different flavor of voice tech to businesses,” Ahrens told TechCrunch via email (unfortunately, he was unavailable for a live interview). His two prior startups, iSpeech for text-to-speech and Haystack for face recognition, were API-based.
“Voice.ai is different because we focus on bringing enterprise tech directly to consumers at an affordable price.” “Come to us from classical DSP voice changers and voice modulators which they had been using in the past and which are still popular among many gamers and streamers,” he said.
Related;Cisco Launches New AI Networking Chips To Compete With Broadcom, Marvell
“Affordable” has two tiers, with most customers on a free service that asks them to opt in to supplying processing resources to train Voice.ai’s models on its own private data set of “millions of unique users.” The site doesn’t list prices, therefore we’re inquiring.
“We believe in making technology accessible and plan on working with the open source community to democratize Voice AI technology,” said Ahrens.
Voice.ai claims it has a completely innovative technique to modifying a voice, tapping into Vtubers, gamers, and other online avatar culture.
Related;Voice-generating platform ElevenLabs raises $19M, launches detection tool
“Most voice AI companies coming into the space try to build scalable enterprise focused text-to-speech solutions or expensive voice-to-voice services for production studios,” Ahrens added. We start from the opposite end and strive to help people improve their online sound. Our speech-to-speech AI’s main benefit isn’t impersonation. It keeps a user’s mood, timing, and emphasis while substituting the voice, creating an entirely new end product in real time.
Voice.ai raises $6M it’s audience is 70% male and 30% female, maybe due to the demographics of interactive platforms like gaming.
He said that includes “transgender users who can represent themselves with voices that match their identity, as well as users exploring completely new online personas for themselves,” as well as avatar users and privacy seekers.
Mucker invested in Voice.ai because it believes it can build a network of developers using and integrating its software.
Lead investor Mucker Capital partner Omar Hamoui stated Voice.ai will transform the AI development ecosystem like AdMob did for mobile app developers. (Hamoui built AdMob, which Google acquired, so he has experience designing mobile developer tools.) “Voice.ai democratizes access for developers worldwide by offering user-friendly solutions that were once exclusive to large enterprises.”
Karl Alomar, the former Digital Ocean COO who oversaw M13’s investment, said investors will participate in the following stage. “At Digital Ocean we saw the value of building a community of builders by builders,” he stated. “We’re excited for creators and developers to build on Voice.ai.”
Follow our socials Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google News.
