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.
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.
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.