WellSaid attracts $10M A round for higher quality synthetic speech – TechCrunch

WellSaid Labs, whose tools create synthetic speech that could be mistaken for the real thing, has raised a $10M Series A to grow the business. The company's home-baked text-to-speech engine works faster than real time and produces natural-sounding clips of pretty much any length, from quick snippets to hours-long readings. WellSaid came out of the Allen Institute for AI incubator in 2019, and its goal was to make synthetic voices that didn't sound so robotic for common business purposes like training and marketing content. It achieved that first by basing its solution on Tacotron, a speech engine developed by Google and academic researchers. But soon it had built its own that was more efficient, resulted in more convincing voices, and could produce clips of arbitrary lengths.