PlayAI's $21M Funding and New "Dialog" Speech Model Release

We've raised $21m to craft the voice of intelligence; delightful easy-to-use voice AI interfaces for individuals and businesses.

We're thrilled to announce that PlayAI has secured $21 million in seed funding from Kindred Ventures, Race Capital, 500Global, and other incredible partners. This marks a pivotal step in our journey to transform how humans and machines interact, advancing human-computer interaction with intelligent, delightful, and easy-to-use voice interfaces for individuals and businesses.

In the era of large language models (LLMs), we believe that voice is the most intuitive and human medium for communication in natural language. Our mission is to make voice-first interfaces as seamless and responsive as a conversation between two people — breaking down barriers between humans and technology.

As part of this announcement, we're proud to introduce our latest model "Dialog", a state-of-the-art multi-turn speech model trained on hundreds of millions of conversations. Unlike traditional speech models, Dialog excels in understanding context and responding with nuanced emotion, enabling an unparalleled human-like conversational experience.

Dialog is the preferred new model for generating expressive speech

The following audio content was entirely generated using Dialog.

Comparing Dialog vs other leading voice models

Human Preference Benchmarks: In blind testing conducted by the independent firm Podonos, 8 out of 10 participants preferred Dialog over other state-of-the-art closed models in both single-turn (text-to-speech) and multi-turn (speech-to-speech) scenarios.

Following are the comparisons of audio using the same text generated by Dialog and other leading speech model

Dialog Others

This funding will fuel our vision to craft the voice of intelligence and be the cornerstone of voice-first human-computer interaction., It will also accelerate research and development, expand our global language and dialect coverage, and enable even more businesses to integrate natural voice communication into their products.

We'd love for you to join us on this journey to redefine how humans and machines connect. Try Dialog today and experience the next chapter of conversational AI.

Stay tuned for more updates, and thank you for being part of the PlayAI story!