Swedish music streaming platform Spotify on Monday announced its decision acquire AI voice platform Sonantic for an undisclosed sum.
London-based startup Sonatic helps creates compelling, nuanced, and stunningly realistic voices from text.
"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," says Ziad Sultan, Spotify's Vice President of Personalization.
"This integration will enable us to engage users in a new and even more personalised way," he added.
Sonantic raised less than $3 million in funding from investors including EQT Ventures, Entrepreneur First (EF), AME Cloud Ventures, Bart Swanson of Horizons Ventures, Twitch's Kevin Lin, Jeremy Jap, Charles Jolley and more.
"We're looking forward to joining Spotify and continuing to build exciting voice experiences," said Sonantic co-founders Zeena Qureshi and John Flynn.
"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," they added.
Spotify said it sees "several potential opportunities for text-to-speech capabilities across our platform".
Last month, Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek announced to invest $50 million into his own music streaming service, saying that the "best days are ahead".
"I've always been vocal about my strong belief in Spotify and what we are building. So I am putting that belief into action this week by investing $50M in $SPOT. I believe our best days are ahead," Ek said in a tweet.
Spotify's premium subscribers jumped 15 per cent (on-year) to reach 182 million in the first quarter (Q1) of 2022, up from 180 million in the previous quarter, despite the Joe Rogan controversy involving Covid misinformation on his podcast.
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The company said its monthly active users (MAUs) went up 19 per cent year-on-year to 422 million, up from 406 million last quarter and above its guidance by 4 million.
Previously, Spotify had also acquired two podcast tech companies, Chartable and Podsights, with the intention to focus on its podcast feature. It is also working on many of its features, the latest being the launch of video podcasting in April. It is also working on a TikTok-like music discovery feed.