Popular music streaming company Spotify is acquiring London-based voice AI company Sonantic. Sonantic has built an AI engine that creates realistic-sounding voices from the text. Spotify didn’t confirm the financial terms of the deal.
Spotify will use Sonantic’s technology to offer better recommendations and bring new audio experiences.
Sonantic is not much known but the company recently helped bring Val Kilmer’s voice to life in Top Gun: Maverick. In reality, Val Kilmer cannot speak because he lost his voice due to throat cancer. Sonantic collected voice samples of Kilmer and processed them. Then voice samples were used to train the model with its AI engine.
“We’re really excited about the potential to bring Sonantic’s AI voice technology onto the Spotify platform and create new experiences for our users,” says Ziad Sultan, Spotify’s Vice President of Personalization. “This integration will enable us to engage users in a new and even more personalized way.”
“We’re looking forward to joining Spotify and continuing to build exciting voice experiences,” said Sonantic co-founders Zeena Qureshi and John Flynn.
Spotify see several opportunities for text-to-speech capabilities on its platform. This is the reason it is acquiring Sonantic. The company could invest more in AI technology in the coming months.
