Sonantic, a London-based startup that wants to disrupt gaming industry with human-quality artificial voices gets funded

In the current technologically advanced era when everything is dominated by the likes of voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, it is important for the voice tech to be more expensive and loaded with realistic elements. The UK startup has developed human-quality artificial voice technology targeted at the gaming and entertainment industry.

Founded in 2018 by Zeena Qureshi and John Flynn, Sonantic, which was previously known as Speak Ai is aimed at disrupting the entertainment and gaming voice industry. Its artificial voice tech is touted to be more expressive and features realistic voice acting on-demand to be used by game studios. It already has R&D partnerships wit over 10 AAA game studios.

Secures €2.3M funding

In a recent development, Sonantic secured €2.3 million funding in a round led by EQT Ventures along with participation from existing backers such as Entrepreneur First, AME Cloud Ventures and Bart Swanson of Horizon Ventures. The startup aims to use this investment to create AI voice models that can be leased to game studios to be voice characters.

Sonantic is gearing up to reveal how the technology can capture deep emotions in the full spectrum from subtle to exaggerated. This is something that only very talented actors can achieve.

Challenges faced by game developers

Getting dialogues into the game development is an expensive, slow and labour-intensive task. Dialogue pipelines consist of booking studios, casting, scheduling, contracts, editing, directing, and coordination. Sonantic wants to resolve several challenges involved in the same as it takes voice narrative video games up to 10 years, which delays the game releases.

To resolve this challenge, Sonantic offers dynamic voice acting on-demand, which is the ability to create a specific type of character in terms of accent, tone, personality, gender, and emotional state. The company’s human-quality text-to-speech system is provided by an API and a graphical user interface tool that lets synthetic voice actors be sculpted, directed and edited similar to human actors.

It benefits game studios as it provides faster iteration cycles at a much affordable cost by reducing the logistical expenses and has voice models that are ready to perform. Its API and SaaS model makes it easier to create audio performances that can test out potential narratives.

Stock photo from peterschreiber.media/Shutterstock

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