We’re excited to announce that ConverseNow is partnering with Rime to make their powerful restaurant conversation systems, which power voice experiences at Dominos and Wingstop, all the more realistic and compelling with Rime. Let's look into why this is a smart move.

At Rime, our mission is to create the most natural, customizable, and enterprise-ready conversational voice synthesis technologies. Our partnership with ConverseNow advances our shared goal of making consumer-focused voice AI delightful, efficient, and compelling.

ConverseNow is a market leader and is live in thousands of stores across 43 states, processing millions of conversations each month and evolving every day.

Rime’s highly reliable and fast speech synthesis API enables ConverseNow to generate value for its customers and wow its end users.

Over the years, ConverseNow experimented with the legacy players in TTS, but found their offerings to be not realistic or compelling enough. They also tried out a variety of next-gen offerings, but found them to be too slow, prone to hallucinations, and not appropriate for their use-case.

We moved from Azure to Rime TTS because they were able to provide us with TTS that’s perfectly matched with our LLMs and call-flows. LLMs add a bit of extra latency, and the cloud version of Rime's TTS API helps us maintain the operational efficiency we're known for. Rime is now seamlessly integrated with our Voice AI platform, and their team is in lock step with us as we expand to new restaurants, ensuring coverage for new brands and menu items on-the-fly. Their ultra-natural and diverse voices leave our customers delighted and surprised they’re talking to a AI agent!

-- Akshay Kayastha, ConverseNow

Rime’s highly reliable and fast speech synthesis API enables ConverseNow to generate value for its customers and delight its end users. Lowest latency, zero hallucinations, contextually perfect style, and powerful customer support.

Below, we outline some problems ConverseNow was facing and how Rime meets those challenges.

Latency

Problem: ConverseNow needs to serve it’s customers in real time, so their conversational AI stack needs to be as fast as possible.

Solution: Rime’s offers best-in-class latency, at scale, integrating flawlessly

Rime offers the lowest latency TTS in the the world, not just for its own sake, but because it makes integration with relatively latency-heavy components of the Voice AI stack a no-brainer. This gives ConverseNow the flexibility to work their secret sauce without suffering from unnecessary slowdowns.

Demographic Appropriateness

Problem: ConverseNow serves restaurants across the country, and there is a wide variety of accents and customer demographics they’re serving.

Solution: Rime offers the widest variety of speech demographics and accents on the market.

Rime doesn't just offer standard American accents. Voice is not a one-size-fits-all affair, and we offer different voices and accents that are appropriate different contexts and customer demographics. This allows ConverseNow to delight customers specifically, whether they're in Albuquerque or Atlanta.

New words and terms

Problem: As ConverseNow expands to new restaurants and new menu items, they need a system that can adapt quickly and seamlessly to any type of new name or menu item.

Solution: At Rime, we've developed system to react to new words and phrases on-the-fly and generate the perfect pronunciation.

Language is always changing, and so we’ve built models that change with it. At Rime, we offer flexible voice solutions that work at the speed of business.

Companies, particularly in the service industry, are very conscientious of their brand. And Rime allows us to tailor our offerings and maintain brand identity by ensuring that brand-critical words are pronounced correctly.

-- Akshay Kayastha

Domain specificity

Problem: Ordering food at a restaurant requires a nuanced and particular style of speech.

Solution: Rime tailors its speech offerings to fit the style and tone that is appropriate for each utterance and each type of voice interaction.

The audiobook-style that most TTS providers rely on is simply inappropriate for this domain. At Rime, we're knowledgeable and sensitive to the nuanced differences between different types of conversation and speech. We have Voice AI-specific offerings for customers like ConverseNow as well as a wide variety of other business use cases. This makes the difference between a comfortable assuring conversation and a bewildering and frustrating one.