In an official statement, Spotify said it acquired the AI Voice startup Sonantic, which works on turning text into speech. The acquisition will enhance text-to-speech features. Spotify believes high-quality voices will face a demand surge, thus looking at the investment as a long-term solution.
Ziad Sultan, Vice President of Spotify, said, “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, this integration will enable us to engage users in a new and even more personalized way.”
Recently, Spotify has been indulged in similar acquisitions of tech podcast companies like Podsights and Chartable. The company aims to establish its dominance in the audiobook market and become a podcast leader. The acquisition of Sonantic can be viewed as yet another effort to stand out from its competitors.
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Sonantic is a startup that focuses on delivering realistic voices. Zeena Qureshi and John Flynn, founders of Sonantic, said, “We’re looking forward to joining Spotify and continuing to build exciting voice experiences, we believe in the power voice has and its ability to foster a deeper connection with listeners around the world, and we know we can be better than ever on the world’s largest audio platform.”
Spotify is yet to disclose the exact terms of the acquisition and its intention to venture into the text-to-speech startup business. However, it claims it has identified several opportunities based on the same. It believes it can use Sonantic’s tech to provide context about upcoming recommendations without them having to look at the screen.
