Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more
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.”
A voice model that ‘acts human’
Rime’s multimodal and autoregressive TTS model was trained on natural conversations with real people (as opposed to voice actors). Users simply type in a text prompt description of a voice with desired demographic characteristics and language.
For instance: ‘I want a 30 year old female who lives in California and is into software,’ or ‘Give me an Australian man’s voice.’
“Every time you do that, you’re going to get a different voice,” said Clifford.
Rime’s Mist v2 TTS model was built for high-volume, business-critical applications, allowing enterprises to craft unique voices for their business needs. “The customer hears a voice that allows for a natural, dynamic conversation without needing a human agent,” said Clifford.
For those looking for out-of-the-box options, meanwhile, Rime offers eight flagship speakers with unique characteristics:
Luna (female, chill but excitable, Gen-Z optimist)
Celeste (female, warm, laid-back, fun-loving)
Orion (male, older, African-American, happy)
Ursa (male, 20 years old, encyclopedic knowledge of 2000s emo music)
Astra (female, young, wide-eyed)
Esther (female, older, Chinese American, loving)
Estelle (female, middle-aged, African-American, sou …