Mar 12, 2024
Deepgram’s Aura gives AI agents a voice
Posted by Gemechu Taye in category: robotics/AI
Deepgram has made a name for itself as one of the go-to startups for voice recognition. Today, the well-funded company announced the launch of Aura, its new real-time text-to-speech API. Aura combines highly realistic voice models with a low-latency API to allow developers to build real-time, conversational AI agents. Backed by large language models (LLMs), these agents can then stand in for customer service agents in call centers and other customer-facing situations.
As Deepgram co-founder and CEO Scott Stephenson told me, it’s long been possible to get access to great voice models, but those were expensive and took a long time to compute. Meanwhile, low latency models tend to sound robotic. Deepgram’s Aura combines human-like voice models that render extremely fast (typically in well under half a second) and, as Stephenson noted repeatedly, does so at a low price.