Voice AI platform Phonic gets backing from Lux

The quality of AI-generated voices is good enough for things like creating audiobooks and podcasts, having articles read aloud to you, and basic customer support. But many businesses don’t think AI voice tech is quite reliable enough to deploy. That’s why two MIT grads, Moin Nadeem and Nikhil Murthy (pictured above), founded Phonic, a company offering an end-to-end voice stack to increase synthetic voice reliability while decreasing latency. Nadeem and Murthy met at MIT, and have known each other for more than seven years. When the duo started building Phonic last year, they felt there weren’t many companies crafting complete voice tech solutions. “Voice AI is at a place where you tie up different parts, such as automatic voice recognition [and] text-to-speech, and [then integrate] intelligence,” Murthy told TechCrunch. “However, when we talked to actual customers, we found that there is a lack of [solutions] that [are] reliable at scale.” Nadeem, who previously worked at MosaicML, ... Read full article.