WellSaid raises $10M to produce synthetic voices

WellSaid Labs, a startup building synthetic voice technologies, today announced it has raised $10 million in a series A round led by Fuse, with participation from Voyager, Qualcomm Ventures, and GoodFriends. The round, which was oversubscribed, will help the company’s R&ampD and develop its group, according to CEO Matt Hocking.

Creating organic-sounding speech from text is regarded a grand challenge in the field of AI and has been a analysis target for decades. Content creators and item designers have extended faced tradeoffs in between high-quality and scalability when utilizing text-to-speech tools versus human voiceovers. But with AI, creators, item developers, and brands have the prospective to energy experiences with a wide wide variety of voice designs, accents, and languages at scale. Startups developing virtual beings, or artificial men and women powered by AI, have collectively raised more than $320 million in venture capital to date.

WellSaid launched in 2018 as a analysis project at the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence, a lab began by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen with the mission of conducting pivotal AI analysis and engineering. WellSaid’s group set out to build the most lifelike synthetic voices, with CTO Michael Petrochuck major R&ampD to construct the important AI.

“What started as a research project … is now a growth-stage startup with thousands of customers in media and advertising, technology, manufacturing, defense, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and education,” Hocking told VentureBeat by means of e-mail. “In terms of the fundamentals of the business, [due to the pandemic] our mid-market and enterprise customers [have] accelerated and shifted a substantial amount of their voiceover and media productions from in-person to remote locations. This added more moving pieces and quality issues to their productions.”

AI-powered speech

Using WellSaid, firms can choose from a variety of voice avatars and build voiceovers straight from a script, with one or numerous voices based on style, gender, and production kind. They’re capable to make edits to the copy, alter the pausing, or use a distinct voice and teach the platform to say terms with exceptional spellings and pronunciations. WellSaid also permits customers to share projects and files with group members, as effectively as developing voice avatars for branded content, developing avatars from the voice of a actual individual with only a handful of hours of recordings.

Over two years, WellSaid incrementally enhanced the naturalness of its synthetic voices, aiming for “human parity,” according to Hocking. In a July 2019 study, the firm asked participants to listen to a set of randomized recordings produced by WellSaid and by human voice actors and rank them on a scale of 1  to 5, with 5 being the highest high-quality. The voice actors accomplished an typical rating of about 4.5, even though WellSaid’s voices earned scores close to their human counterparts (4.282).

The present focus for Seattle, Washington-based WellSaid, which has 12 workers, is enhancing the platform’s handling of distinct text lengths and designs, as effectively as speeding up voice generation. The firm mentioned it requires about 4 seconds to build a 10-second audio file.

“Enterprises use WellSaid Studio to create voiceovers for training and corporate content. They choose WellSaid to optimize their workflows because of the high-quality voices available and to gain cost efficiencies,” Hocking continued. “Product developers integrate [our] API to their experiences to enable voice across their user experience. They rely on the quality of the voices, scalability of the infrastructure, and real-time rendering unmatched by other providers. [As for] brands and creators, [they] use WellSaid to create their own and exclusive AI voice avatars to spec. We partner with them to design, build, host, and deploy their unique AI voices according to their needs and production specs.”

WellSaid’s technologies and comparable offerings from Microsoft, Amazon, Resemble AI, Synthesia, Deepdub, Papercup, and other people have fueled issues about misuse and deepfakes, or synthetic media made use of for nefarious purposes like imitating executives throughout earnings calls. But Hocking mentioned WellSaid does not build voice avatars without having actors’ permission and subscribes to the “Hippocratic Oath for AI” proposed by Microsoft executives Brad Smith and Harry Shum.

“With WellSaid, companies that might have not been ready to deploy synthetic media can now invest in the technology, as it gives them the ability to continue to produce and publish mission-critical content without sacrificing quality,” Hocking mentioned. “We are proud of what we’ve accomplished and grateful for the business we’ve built.”

This most recent round brings WellSaid’s total raised to date to $12 million.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz