Rime and Dialpad partner to bring human generated AI voice models to millions of customer calls. The cloud communications giant is partnering with the academic-led speech startup to solve the biggest bottleneck in AI customer service: sounding genuinely human. 2 minutes read The enterprise race to automate customer service has a glaring bottleneck: no matter how intelligent the underlying AI becomes, if it sounds like a stilted machine, customers will still demand a human. Cloud communications powerhouse Dialpad is moving to solve this natively. Today, the company announced a strategic partnership with voice AI startup Rime, tapping the linguistics-first platform as the premier text-to-speech (TTS) engine for its global suite of agentic voice products. The move signals a critical shift in the contact center industry. As enterprises move away from legacy, rigid Interactive Voice Response (IVR) phone trees toward agentic AI, autonomous systems capable of dynamically understanding intent and executing complex resolutions, the demand for hyper-realistic audio has become a business imperative. The science of sounding human. Founded in 2022 by academic speech scientists and Stanford engineers, Rime isn't just generating synthetic audio; it focuses heavily on the nuanced linguistics required for real-world enterprise interactions. The platform is designed to capture emotional tone and seamlessly navigate the unique cadence required to read back complex data like phone numbers or account details with ultra-low latency. For Dialpad, whose customer experience platform is backed by heavyweights like T-Mobile, AAA, Nasdaq, and RE/MAX, the decision followed a rigorous analysis of all voice AI providers. "We partnered with Rime because our evaluation found that Rime's models met our requirements for naturalness and expressiveness, felt the most natural, and captured human emotion better than anything else we tested," said Craig Walker, CEO and Founder of Dialpad. Scaling the concierge experience. By piping Rime's enterprise-grade voice models into Dialpad's infrastructure, the partnership aims to transform routine inbound calls from frustrating dead-ends into seamless, branded interactions. "Partnering with Dialpad allows us to bring hyper-realistic, emotionally expressive voice AI to businesses on a massive scale," noted Rime CEO and co-founder Lily Clifford. She emphasized that the integration gives companies the ability to deliver "concierge-level experiences to every customer." Crucially, the deal establishes a direct feedback loop between the two engineering teams. As Dialpad deploys these autonomous agents across its customer base, Rime will continuously refine its models. For businesses, it promises a future where AI handles the routine busywork flawlessly, finally freeing human agents to focus exclusively on the high-value conversations that drive revenue. Companies can try Rime's voice AI models today at https://www.rime.ai/.

For the first time in human history, a rich understanding of language is available as a utility, delivered via API, useful enough to “be metered”. Intelligence has become a tool: something you can call, compose, and build on, divorced from any individual human mind.

Rime reels in $24 million. SAN FRANCISCO - Rime, an enterprise voice AI platform, has reeled in $24 million in Series A funding led by M13, with participation from Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital, and continued participation from Unusual Ventures and other existing investors. Morgan Blumberg, Partner at M13, will join Rime's Board of Directors. The funds will be used to invest in Rime's proprietary conversational dataset and make strategic hires in engineering and research as the company scales its infrastructure. Rime also announced the appointment of Rafael Valle as Chief Science Officer. Valle, who previously led audio research at Meta's Super Intelligence Lab, joins Rime to accelerate the company's research and product innovation. Discover more Personal Aircraft Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence Engineering & Technology Voice is the last interface computers are still bad at. While many voice AI companies chase generic signals of naturalness, Rime takes a linguistics-first approach. Founded by Lily Clifford (while pursuing a Stanford linguistics PhD), Brooke Larson (PhD linguist, ex-Amazon Alexa), and Ares Geovanis (Stanford engineer), Rime blends academic speech science with one of the world's largest collections of expressive multilingual conversational speech. The bet is that the company defining this next interface won't be the one with the biggest model, it will be the one that can measure what good actually sounds like, and design toward it. "The things that matter most in conversation are the hardest to pin down. Response relevance is hard to specify; speech appropriateness is hard to verify. There's no unit test for sounding like you care," said Lily Clifford, co-founder and CEO of Rime. "That's exactly why this is a design problem, not just an engineering one. We're building voice interaction models, systems where our linguistic judgment and taste become research instruments, not afterthoughts. With this new funding and Rafael Valle joining as Chief Science Officer, we're 10x-ing our data investment to define the design language of conversational general intelligence." Today, Rime powers nearly 100 million phone calls monthly for companies like Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, Upstart, and Asurion. By staying focused strictly on the modeling layer and their linguistics roots, the platform has gained significant traction in healthcare and financial services, where pronunciation accuracy for complex terminology and HIPAA compliance are critical. "In financial services, the stakes for voice AI are exceptionally high and accuracy is a requirement for customer trust," said Shiv Indap, Upstart. "Rime's ability to handle complex financial use cases with precision allows us to build experiences that truly serve our customer's needs." The efficacy of Rime's approach was recently validated by an independent study conducted by Miravoice, which evaluated 12 voices from three vendors, across 100,000 calls, finding that Rime's voices resulted in statistically significantly lower "Hung Up During Intro" (HUDI) rates compared to major competitors. Rime also demonstrated the fastest median time to completion among all providers tested, proving that linguistic nuances like cadence and speed drive measurable business results. Rime voices keep more customers on the line longer. Discover more Time & Calendars Business Formation Business & Corporate Law "The design patterns that will define the speech-to-speech era of AI haven't been built yet. Rime is doing the foundational work by combining frontier AI with deep linguistic expertise to create the speech infrastructure the next generation of AI products will rely on," said Morgan Blumberg, Partner at M13. "Lily, Ares and Brooke are building Rime with the rare combination of world-class AI research and deep linguistic expertise to deploy real time voice people can trust in complex, regulated environments."