Bringing deep linguistic expertise to voice AI
Rime's mission is to make voice AI sound and feel human.
Founded by linguists, engineers, and product experts, Rime blends advanced ML with deep linguistic and sociolinguistic insight to create ultra-realistic voices that breathe, laugh, code-switch, and carry the subtle rhythms of real speech. These voices build trust, empathy, and engagement in every interaction to drive business outcomes.
Built in a studio, not scraped from the web
Rime was founded in 2022 by Lily Clifford (Stanford NLP PhD dropout), Brooke Larson (PhD linguist, ex-Amazon Alexa), and Ares Geovanos (Stanford engineer, product veteran). The team set out to move beyond robotic, over-polished speech toward genuine, human-like conversation.
They built an in-house recording studio in San Francisco, capturing the biggest proprietary data set of full-duplex, spontaneous speech including interruptions, laughter, and vocal disfluencies that became the foundation for Rime's models. Backed by Unusual Ventures, Cadenza Capital, Founders You Should Know, and additional angel investors, Rime now powers tens of millions of conversations monthly spanning industries from food service to healthcare.
Speech the way people actually speak
Rime's proprietary dataset is one of the largest collections of expressive, multi-lingual conversational speech in the world, captured both in-studio and across diverse locations in the United States. This dataset reflects a wide range of accents, dialects, demographics, and real-world communication patterns.
Every voice model is trained to handle the practical realities of enterprise communication: brand names, tricky pronunciations, lists, spellings, numbers, IDs, and more. Fine-grained custom pronunciation tools give businesses the ability to control exactly how a word sounds, down to the syllable, to ensure accuracy and brand consistency.
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