Start up synthetic speech technology murfic literally gives a voice to content creators of all sizes. Murf, which now has a library of more than 120 human parity AI voices in 20 languages, today announced it has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Matrix partners. Participation came from recurring investors Elevation Capital and several prominent angel investors such as Ola founder Ankit Bhai; Disney Streaming SVP of product; Ashwini Asokan, the founder of Mad Street Dap; and Pushkar Mukewar, founder Drip Capital
Founded in October 2020 by IIT-Kharagpur school friends Sneha Roy, Ankur Edkie and Divyanshu Pandey, Murf’s earlier funding announcement was $1.5 million seed capital led by Elevation Capital and angel investors who helped them recruit talent, invest in product innovation and user acquisition. Murf says it has grown 26x in ARR since its first round, synthesizing over a million voiceover projects, in a wide variety of speaking styles and tones.
Some examples of how Murf’s technology has been used include a tech entrepreneur and artist who created a full-length movie using AI art models, deep fake programs, and AI Voices from Murf Studio; an entertainment animation agency that has created a TV series featuring a collection of Murf’s voices; authors who create fantasy audiobooks using Murf’s AI voices; and a YouTube influencer who used Murf’s AI voice to create a rap video.
The founders of Murf
Edkie, Murf’s CEO, told ukbusinessupdates.com that while Murf’s founding team has worked in different domains in the past, they all ran into the pain points of creating high-quality voiceovers. This included creating and updating product demos and shooting radio and video ads. He added that the pandemic has “given a boost to multimedia creation and the demand for scalable audio content grew rapidly.”
Murf’s customers have used it in a variety of ways, including advertising, audiobooks, explainer videos, and e-learning. Murf.ai, the SaaS platform, was developed to make it easier for customers to create natural-sounding, high-quality voiceovers for any commercial purpose. The company’s clients range in size from individual content creators to SMBs and enterprises, working in industries such as education, business, healthcare, media and entertainment, marketing, advertising, podcasting, customer support, and more.
Edkie, told ukbusinessupdates.com that content creators and marketing teams often record voiceovers themselves, or outsource the entire process, both of which are “cumbersome, expensive, and time-consuming.” Murf, on the other hand, lets users generate “human-like” voiceovers without having to buy recording equipment or hire a voice artist.
The company also wants to remove the limitations of what text-to-speech can do. “While TTS has been around for quite some time, limitations in speech quality have limited its use. By leveraging recent advances in AI and deep learning, we are enabling the creation of high-fidelity synthetic voices that mimic the natural prosody and pronunciation of human speech.”
Murf’s platform includes an AI-enabled SaaS tool that helps users generate “human” voices, typically for use in videos or presentations, without purchasing complex and expensive recoding equipment or hiring a voice artist. Content creators can use an online voice recording booth, where they can sample a wide variety of speaking styles. Murf aims to bridge the diversity gap in traditional text-to-speech platforms by incorporating voices across accents such as African American, British, Australian and others.
According to market reports used by the founders of Murf, the global text speech market is expected to reach $7.06 billion by 2028, with a CAG of 14.6%. Meanwhile, the voice-over and dubbing markets are expected to generate a total of $8 billion per year by 2027.
Text-to-speech has been around for years, but due to quality limitations, they were mainly used by voice assistants and chatbots. But with recent advances in AI and deep learning, it is now possible to create synthetic voices that have the prosody and pronunciation of human speech. Murf’s AI engine is trained on hours of real human speech and Murf Studios offers over 120 AI voices from different types of people, who can speak in 20 languages. Murf is also working on introducing more diverse accents by partnering with voice actors to bring voices such as African American, British and Australian English abroad.
Murf’s AI-powered text-to-speech can also learn from contextual information to provide the right answers. The founders describe Murf as an “all-in-one speech solution” that allows users to add images, videos and background music. It also has features for pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), voice adjustments that change the user’s pitch, pause, emphasis and speed.
Murf earns money through a subscription for his services. It came out of beta testing in January 2021 and has grown 22x in ARR in the last 18 months and has synthesized over a million voiceover projects to date.
Edkie said Murf’s main competitors are the major technology and cloud companies such as Google, Amazon, Polly and Microsoft, which have the leading text-to-speech platforms in the market. Murf sets itself apart with natural sounding AI voices that also support multiple accents and styles.
“Going beyond a simple text-to-speech tool, our platform allows users to add images, videos, presentations and the voiceover, add background music and fully sync them to create compelling content,” he said. Eddie. Murf’s AI-powered TTS can also learn from large amounts of contextual information to create contextual speech. For example, it has built-in context awareness that can recognize commonly used entity formats such as numbers, currency, percentages, addresses, dates and times, reducing their arbitrariness and bringing them closer to a predefined standard, Edkie added.
In a prepared statement, Mukul Arora, co-managing partner of Elevation Capital, said: “AI-powered, lifelike voiceovers are the next frontier in the text-to-speech market. Murf, with their amazing founding team and unique IP, is perfectly poised to gain a leadership position in this space. Their execution prowess and tech-first focus is evident in the solid traction and growth they have shown to date. We are very excited to redouble our partnership with Murf. ”
