AI voice, synthetic speech company LOVO gets $4.5M pre-series A funding – TechCrunch

"Voice skins" have become a very popular feature for AI-based voice assistants, to help personalize some of the more anodyne aspects of helpful, yet also kind of bland and robotic, speaking voices you get on services like Alexa. Now a startup that is building voice skins for different companies to use across their services, and for third parties to create and apply as well, is raising some funding to fuel its growth. LOVO, the Berkeley, California-based artificial intelligence (AI) voice & synthetic speech tool developer, this week closed a $4.5 million pre-Series A round led by South Korean Kakao Entertainment along with Kakao Investment and LG CNS, an IT solution affiliate of LG Group. Its previous investor SkyDeck Fund and a private investor, vice president of finance at DoorDash, Michael Kim, also joined the funding. The proceeds will be used to propel its research and development in artificial intelligence and synthetic speech and grow the team.