Palo Alto-based PlayAI has secured $21 million in seed funding to advance its technology for generating artificial intelligence speech, which can clone voices in multiple languages and accents.
This round of financing is provided by Kindred Ventures (Backer of London-based music, travel and experiences company pollenand the NFT market a little) and 500 globalparticipants from Race Capital, Y Combinator, and other investors. After the investment is completed, Steve Chang Members of Kindred Ventures join as Board Observers.
Play AI It said it will use the funding to support its ambitious vision of creating “more natural” and “human-like” conversational voice interfaces. The company’s latest model, Play dialoguses conversational context to generate speech with subtle prosody, mood, and rhythm.
PlayAI’s platform allows developers to create voice applications without having to build custom models from scratch. The company offers models in more than 30 languages, targeting industries such as healthcare, travel and customer support. The market for artificial intelligence-powered speech generation is expected to quadruple over the next decade, according to one company market.us Reports show investors see huge potential.
“Voice artificial intelligence represents $2 trillion markets, and at Race Capital we thrive by partnering with founders tackling big challenges in huge markets. Chris McCanngeneral partner at Race Capital.
“Building voice agents that can talk like humans and handle complex tasks autonomously is no easy task, and I’m extremely proud of what our team has accomplished.”
Mahmoud Fifelplay AI
“Play AI’s voice AI platform is the key to unlocking new applications in customer support, sales, marketing and more. We are very excited to partner with Mahmoud [Felfel]Hamad [Syed]and the PlayAI team who embarked on this journey.
Mahmoud FairfieldPlayAI co-founder and CEO added: “Voice as an interface is rapidly gaining popularity, and we knew from the beginning that this was a huge opportunity.
“Building voice agents that can talk like humans and handle complex tasks autonomously is no easy task, and I’m extremely proud of what our team has accomplished. This funding will help us realize the goal of delivering powerful, emotionally rich, and class-like capabilities for any application.” The vision of human voice interfaces.
However, the company faces significant ethical challenges that could undermine its technological achievements.
reported on TechCrunch PlayAI said its platform allows users to copy sounds with minimal verification. In testing, it said users would only need to self-certify their ownership of the rights, allowing for potential abuse of the technology. TechCrunch Prove this by creating unauthorized voice clones, including voice clones of public figures e.g. Kamala Harris.
Despite claims of strong safeguards, TechCrunch Indicates that the platform’s social portal hosts explicit content.
“PlayAI has several ethical safeguards in place. For example, we have implemented powerful mechanisms to identify whether speech has been synthesized using our technology.
Hamad Saeed, PlayAI
Co-founder of PlayAI Hamad Said Tell TechCrunch They immediately investigate and take action against users who abuse the platform. Additionally, Syed highlighted the cost barrier to creating high-quality voice clones, suggesting this could limit the potential for malicious use. PlayAI’s highest-fidelity voice cloning requires a 20-minute voice sample and is priced at $49 Billed monthly or annually or $99 News outlets say every month.
TechCrunch noted that PlayAI operates in a complex legal environment, as some states, such as Tennessee, have laws in place to prevent unauthorized recording.
“PlayAI has several ethical safeguards in place. For example, we have implemented robust mechanisms to identify whether speech has been synthesized using our technology,” Syed said. “If we discover any abuse, we will immediately verify the source of the content and take decisive action to correct the situation and prevent further ethical violations.”
The company’s approach to model training remains vague. Syed claims that they use “mostly open datasets” and proprietary internal datasets to avoid user data. However, the AI industry increasingly faces scrutiny over data sources and potential copyright infringement.
PlayAI enters a crowded market with competitors including ElevenLabs, Papercup, Deepdub, Acapela, Respeecher, and voice.aiand tech giants Amazon and Microsoft. Last week, Microsoft released a new interpreter feature for Teams, a tool that allows users to replicate their own voices in meetings.
Interestingly, some music labels, e.g. universal music groupis exploring AI voice cloning technology cautiously, but only using tools deemed ethical. In June, UMG and sound labIt is an artificial intelligence technology company that focuses on providing music creators with “ethically” trained tools. This partnership provides UMG’s artists and producers with artificial intelligence technology through SoundLabs microphone dropan AI voice plug-in.
Last month, the partnership announced its first AI-powered version: a Spanish version Brenda Lee’s Iconic festive craze, Swinging around the Christmas tree, First recorded 66 years ago.
As generative artificial intelligence continues to advance, PlayAI’s journey highlights the need to balance technological innovation with ethical considerations. PlayAI’s success will depend not only on its technical capabilities but also on its ability to address the ethical challenges surrounding AI-generated speech technology.
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