Enterprise voice AI company Rime has entered a strategic partnership with Dialpad to provide text-to-speech technology across Dialpad’s agentic voice AI products. Under the agreement, Rime will serve as Dialpad’s premier text-to-speech provider, bringing its conversational speech models to customer interactions across the communications platform. The partnership is intended to make automated voice experiences sound more natural and expressive as businesses increasingly deploy AI agents to handle customer service tasks.
Bringing Natural Voices to AI Agents
Rime’s technology will be integrated into Dialpad’s agentic systems, which are designed to understand customer requests, determine appropriate actions, and complete tasks with limited human intervention. The companies aim to replace conventional robotic interactive voice response systems and lengthy hold experiences with AI-powered voice agents capable of responding dynamically to customers. These systems can address routine inquiries around the clock while allowing human employees to concentrate on conversations that require greater judgment or expertise.
The partnership reflects growing demand for realistic speech synthesis as AI agents become more capable of handling complete customer interactions rather than simple scripted responses. Voice quality is increasingly important because automated systems must communicate information clearly while maintaining a conversational tone that does not disrupt the customer experience. Dialpad selected Rime following an evaluation of text-to-speech models that focused on naturalness, expressiveness, and the ability to reproduce human emotion.
Rime's Linguistics-Driven Technology
Founded in 2022 by speech scientists and Stanford engineers, Rime develops enterprise speech technology using a linguistics-first approach to voice generation. Its models are designed to produce low-latency speech while capturing variations in tone, emotion, and speaking style, allowing businesses to create voices aligned with their brands. The technology also focuses on practical conversational requirements, including accurately speaking phone numbers and other complex data that voice agents frequently need to communicate.
Rime says its platform now supports more than 100 million interactions each month across sectors including healthcare, finance, and customer experience. The company is backed by investors including M13, Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital, and Unusual Ventures. By integrating with Dialpad, Rime gains access to a broader enterprise communications environment where its speech models can be deployed across a wide range of customer-facing use cases.
Expanding Dialpad's Agentic AI Platform
Dialpad provides an AI-powered customer experience platform that combines communications, automation, and real-time intelligence for businesses. Its Agentic AI technology is designed to resolve routine customer issues, assist sales processes, and automate administrative tasks while working alongside human employees when more complex intervention is required. Customers of the company include organizations such as Randstad, Motorola Solutions, Netflix, the San Diego Padres, and the Colorado Rockies Baseball Club.
Dialpad founder and CEO Craig Walker said Rime's models performed strongly in the company's evaluation because of their ability to produce natural and emotionally expressive speech. Integrating the technology is expected to help organizations maintain more consistent brand voices while improving the quality of automated customer conversations. Dialpad is backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, GV, ICONIQ Capital, and T-Mobile.
Continuous Development
Beyond the initial integration, Rime and Dialpad are establishing a direct feedback process between their engineering teams to support continued development of the voice technology. Feedback generated through production deployments can help Rime refine its models and introduce additional capabilities as customer requirements evolve. The arrangement could also accelerate the deployment of improvements across Dialpad's agentic voice products as new speech capabilities become available.
The partnership positions Rime's speech technology as a core voice layer within Dialpad's expanding agentic AI offering. As enterprises move from traditional automated phone systems toward AI agents capable of managing more sophisticated conversations, realistic and responsive speech is becoming an increasingly important part of the customer experience. Rime and Dialpad are seeking to address that shift by combining autonomous AI capabilities with voice technology designed to make automated interactions feel more natural.