PlayAI clones voices on command
PlayAI, a platform to generate voice clones and voiceovers, has raised capital in a large seed funding round.
Back in 2016, Hammad Syed and Mahmoud Felfel, an ex-WhatsApp engineer, thought it’d be neat to build a text-to-speech Chrome extension for Medium articles. The extension, which could read any Medium story aloud, was featured on Product Hunt. A year later, it spawned an entire business.
“We saw a bigger opportunity in helping individuals and organizations create realistic audio content for their applications,” Syed told TechCrunch. “Without the need to build their own model, they could deploy human-quality speech experiences faster than ever before.”
Syed and Felfel’s company, PlayAI (formerly PlayHT), pitches itself as the “voice interface of AI.” Customers can choose from a number of predefined voices, or clone a voice, and use PlayAI’s API to integrate text-to-speech into their apps.
Toggles allow users to adjust the intonation, cadence, and tenor of voices.
PlayAI also offers a “playground” where users can upload a file to generate a read-aloud version and a dashboard for creating more-polished audio narrations and voiceovers. Recently, the company got into the “AI agents” game with tools that can be used to automate tasks such as answering customer calls at a business.
One of PlayAI’s more interesting experiments is PlayNote, which transforms PDFs, videos, photos, songs, and other files into podcast-style shows, read-aloud summaries, one-on-one debates, and even children’s stories. Like Google’s NotebookLM, PlayNote generates a script from an uploaded file or URL and feeds it to a collection of AI models, which together craft the finished product.