speech-synthesis
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Pavan Kalyan Left the Lab to Make Pharma Paperwork Move at Machine Speed
An IIT Bombay researcher learned to make machines tell stories. Now he and two friends are teaching them the less glamorous, more consequential craft of regulatory documentation.
Murf AI
Murf AI is a voice technology company that turns text into natural-sounding speech. Founded in 2020 by three IIT Kharagpur friends, it started as a self-serve AI voiceover studio for creators and marketers and has since expanded into dubbing, voice cloning, a low-latency text-to-speech API (Falcon), and conversational voice agents. Murf says its platform is used by more than 10 million people and 300+ Forbes 2000 companies across 190+ countries, offering 200+ voices in 35+ languages.
Vlad Chernyshov
Vlad Chernyshov is the co-founder and CEO of Dasha.AI, a New York conversational-voice-AI company he started in late 2016 to build machines that talk like people - with the ums, the breaths, the interruptions and all. A competitive programmer out of Novosibirsk, Russia, he landed his first paying customer (a San Francisco dental practice) the day after Y Combinator rejected him, raised a $2M seed from RTP Global in 2019, and has framed Dasha's real target not as call centers but as artificial general intelligence reached through speech.
Speechify
Speechify is the world's largest text-to-speech platform, turning any text - PDFs, books, emails, Google Docs, web pages - into natural-sounding audio. Founded by dyslexic Brown University student Cliff Weitzman and his brother Tyler, the company grew from a personal reading aid into an AI voice empire spanning consumer apps, a voice cloning and dubbing studio for creators, and a text-to-speech API for developers. It serves 50+ million users across mobile, Chrome extension, and desktop, offers hundreds of voices in 50+ languages, and won the 2025 Apple Design Award for Inclusivity.
Rime
Rime is a San Francisco voice AI company building human-sounding text-to-speech models for enterprise. Founded by linguists and engineers, its Mist and Arcana models power more than 100 million customer phone conversations every month for brands including Domino's and Wingstop, with sub-200ms response times and pronunciation control designed for production call centers.
Lily Clifford
Lily Clifford is the CEO and co-founder of Rime, a San Francisco-based voice AI company building enterprise-grade text-to-speech models with a linguistic edge. A Stanford NLP PhD dropout with a background in sociophonetics, she left academia in 2023 to prove that AI voices could sound like a friend rather than a voice actor. Rime now powers over 100 million phone conversations monthly for brands like Domino's and Wingstop, having raised $8.6M in total funding. Her counterintuitive thesis - that slightly 'bored' voices outperform perfectly polished ones - has become the foundation of a fast-growing enterprise voice platform.