The enterprise race to automate customer service has a glaring bottleneck: no matter how intelligent the underlying AI becomes, if it sounds like a stilted machine, customers will still demand a human.
Cloud communications powerhouse Dialpad is moving to solve this natively. Today, the company announced a strategic partnership with voice AI startup Rime, tapping the linguistics-first platform as the premier text-to-speech (TTS) engine for its global suite of agentic voice products.
The move signals a critical shift in the contact center industry. As enterprises move away from legacy, rigid Interactive Voice Response (IVR) phone trees toward agentic AI, autonomous systems capable of dynamically understanding intent and executing complex resolutions, the demand for hyper-realistic audio has become a business imperative.
The Science of Sounding Human
Founded in 2022 by academic speech scientists and Stanford engineers, Rime isn’t just generating synthetic audio; it focuses heavily on the nuanced linguistics required for real-world enterprise interactions. The platform is designed to capture emotional tone and seamlessly navigate the unique cadence required to read back complex data like phone numbers or account details with ultra-low latency.
For Dialpad, whose customer experience platform is backed by heavyweights like T-Mobile, AAA, Nasdaq, and RE/MAX, the decision followed a rigorous analysis of all voice AI providers.
“We partnered with Rime because our evaluation found that Rime’s models met our requirements for naturalness and expressiveness, felt the most natural, and captured human emotion better than anything else we tested,” said Craig Walker, CEO and Founder of Dialpad.
Scaling the Concierge Experience
By piping Rime’s enterprise-grade voice models into Dialpad’s infrastructure, the partnership aims to transform routine inbound calls from frustrating dead-ends into seamless, branded interactions.
“Partnering with Dialpad allows us to bring hyper-realistic, emotionally expressive voice AI to businesses on a massive scale,” noted Rime CEO and co-founder Lily Clifford. She emphasized that the integration gives companies the ability to deliver “concierge-level experiences to every customer.”
Crucially, the deal establishes a direct feedback loop between the two engineering teams. As Dialpad deploys these autonomous agents across its customer base, Rime will continuously refine its models. For businesses, it promises a future where AI handles the routine busywork flawlessly, finally freeing human agents to focus exclusively on the high-value conversations that drive revenue.
Companies can try Rime’s voice AI models today at https://www.rime.ai/.
