Having machines turn text into speech is nothing new. Professor Stephen Hawking communicated with a computerized voice for many years, and by now, we're used to our GPS devices or smart speakers asking questions and responding to our queries. What is different these days is that the quality of synthesized speech is improving, thanks to several companies using AI to create voice skins for enterprise companies and content creators that give more options for turning text into speech. LOVO, an AI voice and synthetic speech startup company, uses a voiceover API to turn text into speech in real-time using 200 human-like voices in 33 languages using their "voice library." Users also can clone their own voices to create their own skins, simply by reading 15 minutes of a script.

Having machines turn text into speech is nothing new. Professor Stephen Hawking communicated with a computerized voice for many years, and by now, we're used to our GPS devices or smart speakers asking questions and responding to our queries. What is different these days is that the quality of synthesized speech is improving, thanks to several companies using AI to create voice skins for enterprise companies and content creators that give more options for turning text into speech. LOVO, an AI voice and synthetic speech startup company, uses a voiceover API to turn text into speech in real-time using 200 human-like voices in 33 languages using their "voice library." Users also can clone their own voices to create their own skins, simply by reading 15 minutes of a script.

"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.