In 2020, there was a spike in the demand for podcasts and audiobooks as traditional audio production methods are expensive, time-consuming, and extremely tough to personalise and scale across all stages. Post-COVID, the sliced budgets have put them out of reach of marketers. In this situation, London/Barcelona-based Aflorithmic Labs, an Audio-As-A-Service (AaaS) platform, which creates scalable, hyper-personalised audio content with ethical voice cloning and AI voice synthesis technologies comes to play. Its API automates the audio production process entirely.
Funding from Australian media company
Aflorithmic Labs Ltd announced that it raised $1.3M (nearly £1M) seed funding from Australian media giant Crowd Media Holdings. As a part of the investment, Aflorithmic’s technology will be integrated with Crowd’s Social Commerce applications including CMB’s Talking Head technology. It is an AI-driven chatbot, which helps customers have useful conversations across education, health and marketing sectors. The investment will also be used for R&D for the API audio-production engine, voice cloning, and talent acquisition.
“We are excited to learn from Crowd’s experience in empowering companies to reach mass markets, and are pleased to accompany them as they define the future of social commerce,” said Timo Kunz, Co-Founder, and CEO at Aflorithmic. “We believe audio creation as we know it is making way for automated, scalable, dynamic audio experiences – and companies like ours are at the forefront.”
“I believe we can translate the most recent advances in AI research into commercial innovations that will completely reshape the way consumers engage in eCommerce.” said Crowd Media’s Chairman Steven Schapera. “This is the silver bullet Crowd was looking for.”
Automates audio production
Founded in 2019 by Timo Kunz, Peadar Coyle, and Björn Ühss, Aflorithmic works with companies from across industries with use cases including personalised children’s stories narrated with the voice of a family member or celebrity of their choice, voice cloning for marketing applications, and hyper-personalised newsletters and podcasts.
The company enables fully automated, scalable audio production by using synthetic media, voice cloning and audio mastering. With this AaaS platform anyon can create beautiful and podcast-quality audio that is tailored to each individual listener. It lets users compose professional-quality pieces including music and complex audio engineering, then deliver the final product to any device or platform such as websites, mobile apps, or smart speakers. What’s interesting is that these can be done without any previous production experience.
To make mass distribution even simpler, users’ content production is extremely scalable, leading to far higher engagement among audiences. Notably, a single audio item can be scaled into unlimited pieces of content by personalising it for every single listener adapting to their name, location, experience and more.