TECH NEWS

Rime picks up $24M Series A to help enterprises field customer calls

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Voice AI startups’ biggest unlock has been handling calls for enterprises in areas like sales, marketing and customer support. Large organizations are offloading calls to voice model developers like ElevenLabs and Deepgram; infrastructure companies like Vapi, Retell, and LiveKit; and dedicated customer support shops like Decagon and Sierra.

San Francisco-based Rime is trying to gain an edge in this crowded market with its voice AI models that are trained on conversational data that it records, aiming to reduce its clients’ customization load.

Founded in 2022 by former Stanford PhD student Lily Clifford, ex-Amazon Alexa engineer Brooke Larson, and Stanford engineer Ares Geovanos, Rime has built a recording studio in San Francisco to collect its own conversational data rather than relying on scraping the web for audio.

The startup said it focuses on tuning its voice models to nail the pronunciation of different brand entities and industry-specific terms. It...

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The WoW: Forever team says it learned a lot from Classic: Season of Discovery, including managing the in-game economy and RMT — but Blizzard will be 'more careful and cautious' with class changes as it 'knew we were going too far'

* Blizzard Entertainment says it learned plenty of lessons from World of Warcraft Classic: Season of Discovery * It acknowledged that "we were going too far" with class changes in Season of Discovery and "Forever will be a lot more careful and cautious with slower class changes" * The