PlayAI Releases PlayDialog Model for Generative AI Conversations 

PlayAI, providers of a voice and conversational artificial intelligence platform, has raised $21 million in funding that it will invest in its generative AI voice models and voice agent platform.

PlayAI also released a new version of its leading speech model, PlayDialog, a multi-turn text-to-speech model that uses conversations' historical context to control prosody, intonation, emotion, and pacing to deliver more natural sounding speech. Trained on hundreds of millions of conversations, PlayDialog delivers human-like conversation with natural delivery and appropriate tone in real time. Users can create speech with PlayDialog through its editor, API, or via PlayNote, a tool that transforms PDFs, text, videos and other media into captivating stories, podcasts, briefings, and more in minutes.

"Speech as an interface is exploding in popularity, and we knew it was a massive opportunity from the get-go," said Mahmoud Felfel, co-founder and CEO of PlayAI, in a statement. "Building voice agents that can converse like humans and autonomously handle complex tasks is no easy feat, and I'm immensely proud of what our team has achieved. This funding will help us deliver our vision of powerful, emotive, and human-like voice interfaces for any application."

PlayAI enables developers to create voice applications without having to build their own models. The company uses custom large language models (LLMs) trained on an extensive dataset of diverse human speech, representing speech styles like podcasts, narrations, storytelling, and business conversations, with voice cloning across multiple languages and accents.

In addition to its new PlayDialog model, PlayAI also offers Play 3.0 mini, a lighter weight low-latency model that supports more than 30 languages and a voice agent platform for creating generative AI voice agents for customer support, appointment scheduling, and sales lead engagement.

"We've been early true believers in the nascent but rapidly-evolving area of voice AI" said Steve Jang, founder and managing partner of Kindred Ventures, one of the investors in the funding round, in a statement. "PlayAI's state-of-the-art speech models, combined with LLMs, can unlock voice as a new interface for billions of users of personal computing and for developers creating AI agents which fundamentally transform how enterprise and consumer businesses communicate with their customers. We're proud to back the PlayAI team to further the research and product development of their powerful mission."

Chris McCann, general partner at fellow investor Race Capital, added: "Play AI's voice AI platform is the key to unlocking new applications across customer support, sales, marketing, and beyond. We couldn't be more excited to partner with Mahmoud, Hammad, and the PlayAI team on this journey."