Sonantic, a UK startup that has developed “human quality” artificial voice technology for the gaming and entertainment industry, has raised € 2.3 million in funds.
Leading the round is EQT Ventures, with the participation of existing sponsors, including Entrepreneur First (EF), AME Cloud Ventures and Bart Swanson of Horizons Ventures. I also understand that one of the company’s first investors is Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin.
Founded in 2018 by CEO Zeena Qureshi and CTO John Flynn while studying EF’s business creation program in London, Sonantic (formerly Speak Ai) says he wants to disrupt the global gaming and entertainment voice industry. The startup has developed artificial voice technology that, he says, is able to offer “expressive and realistic voice acting” on demand for use in game studios. It already has R&D associations with more than 10 AAA game studios.
“Starting the dialogue in the development of the game is a slow, expensive and laborious task,” says Qureshi, when asked to define the problem that Sonantic wants to solve. “The lines of dialogue consist of casting, reservation studies, contracts, programming, editing, direction and much coordination. Narrative video games with voice can take up to 10 years for game design to change frequently, so predetermined game developers will carry out several iteration cycles, which often leads to delays in budgets and delays games. “
To help remedy this, Sonantic offers what Qureshi calls “dynamic voice acting on demand”, with the ability to create the exact type of character in terms of gender, personality, accent, tone and emotional state. The startup’s human-quality text-to-speech system is offered through an API and a graphical user interface tool that allows its synthetic voice actors to be edited, sculpted and directed “like a human actor,” he tells me. .
This makes Sonantic work directly with the actors to synthesize their voices and at the same time take advantage of their unique performance skills. “Then we increase the way actors work by offering them a digital version of themselves that can generate passive income for them,” explains the CEO of Sonantic.
For game studios, Sonantic offers faster iteration cycles at a cheaper price because it reduces logistics costs and has voice models ready to go. Its SaaS model and API also make it easier to create audio interpretations to test potential narratives or refine a story, which helps edit and direct.
Meanwhile, Sonantic says it is preparing to publicly reveal how its technology can capture “deep emotions across the spectrum,” from the subtle to the exaggerated, which it says is generally something that only very skilled actors can achieve.
