Sonantic has secured £2m funding.
The London company makes artificial voices for video games and claims it is in talks with ‘close to a dozen well-known game studios’.
The seed round was led by EQT Ventures with existing backers Entrepreneur First, AME Cloud Ventures and Bart Swanson of Horizons Ventures also participating.
The firm was founded by speech tech experts Zeena Qureshi and John Flynn, CEO and CTO respectively.
“We believe in the saying, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it,” said Zeena Qureshi, co-founder and CEO.
“Many TTS providers sound robotic because they don’t focus on the details that make voice truly human — breath, pitch, intonation, pacing, intensity, emotion and variety.”
Sonantic wants to free developers from the constraints of using voice actors by giving them API tools capable of customising the voices of characters along themes such gender, personality, accent, tone and emotional state.