Voice artificial intelligence startup PlayHT Inc., which likes to be known simply as PlayAI, said today it has raised $21 million in a seed round of funding.

The round was led by Kindred Ventures. Others, including Race Capital, 500 Global and Y Combinator, also participated. It’s a big amount of money for a seed funding round, but PlayAI has built what looks to be a compelling product in the shape of its “voice agent platform” that allows businesses to quickly create human-quality voices for multipurpose AI agents.

Using PlayAI, developers can create powerful voice applications without needing to train their own models first. The platform relies on custom, low-latency large language models that have been trained on extensive datasets containing thousands of hours of human speech, across styles like podcasts, storytelling, narrations and business conversations. It can create both male and female voices in multiple languages and with various regional accents.

Alongside the funding, PlayAI announced an updated version of its most powerful LLM, called PlayDialog, which supports the “emotional prompting” of generated speed. According to the startup, PlayDialog can create incredibly realistic voices with natural delivery, pacing, emphasis and cadence of speech, and appropriate inflection and tone, to power humanlike conversations.

PlayDialog is available via an application programming interface, a web-based editor and also PlayNote, a newly released tool that can transform PDF files, videos and text into captivating stories, briefings, podcasts or presentations in a matter of minutes.

Users can see the capabilities of PlayDialog using a fun tool that allows anyone to quickly create an AI chatbot that responds in their own voice.

The launch of PlayDialog adds to a growing catalog of voice AI models that also includes Play 3.0 mini, which is a lower-latency and lighter-weight LLM that supports more than 30 widely spoken languages. It’s designed to support the creation of lifelike chatbots in industries such as travel, hospitality, healthcare and retail, with applications including customer support, appointment scheduling and sales engagement, the startup said.

PlayAI co-founder and Chief Executive Mahmoud Felfel said his company has a lot of promise, because building voice agents that can converse just like humans remains very difficult to do. “This funding will help us deliver our vision of powerful, emotive, and human-like speech for any application,” he said.

The startup believes there will be a lot of demand for AI voices in the near future, citing a report from Market.Us that forecasts the AI voice generation industry to grow more than four-fold in the next 10 years. It says voice is becoming increasingly popular in both enterprise and consumer applications, mainly because the technology these days is so much more realistic.

Race Capital General Partner Chris McCann said voice AI will eventually become a $2 trillion global market, and he’s hopeful that PlayAI will have a big part to play in it. “Its voice AI platform is the key to unlocking new applications across customer support, sales, marketing and beyond,” he said.

Image: PlayAI