Voice AI startup Rime and Dialpad have announced a strategic partnership making Rime the premier text-to-speech provider behind all of Dialpad's agentic voice AI products worldwide, after an evaluation in which Dialpad tested major vendors, open-source models, and building in-house. The deal pairs Rime's linguistics-first TTS with Dialpad's customer experience platform, whose customers include Netflix, Randstad, and Motorola Solutions.
On September 10, 2026, Rime announced a strategic partnership with Dialpad, the AI platform for customer experience, under which Rime will serve as the premier text-to-speech provider behind all of Dialpad's agentic voice AI products. When Dialpad's agentic products answer a call, resolve an issue, or follow up with a customer, the voice on the line will be built by Rime. Dialpad has been shipping real-time AI since 2018 and counts Netflix, Randstad, Motorola Solutions, and the San Diego Padres among its customers, while Rime's models already power customer experience for Mayo Clinic, Upstart, and Domino's.
Dialpad ran what Rime called one of the most thorough evaluations it has seen: the company tested major vendors, open-source models, and the option of building its own speech stack. Dialpad CEO and founder Craig Walker said the comparison was decisive â 'We analyzed all the other competitors in the space, and Rime sounded the best. It felt the most natural. It felt the most human.' The details mattered as much as naturalness: phone numbers read back digit by digit, account IDs, addresses, and dates. Rime argues most speech models trained on consumer content stumble in real business conversations, while its models are purpose-built on a linguistics-first foundation â the company was founded in 2022 by academic speech scientists and Stanford engineers and powers over 100 million monthly interactions.
The deal is structured to compound. A direct feedback loop between the two engineering teams means Dialpad's production traffic sharpens Rime's models, and Dialpad receives new Rime voice capabilities the moment they ship. Shezan Kazi, Dialpad's VP of AI Products, said Rime's blend of machine-learning engineering and linguistic science 'creates a unique product that we haven't seen anywhere else in the market.' For Dialpad customers, the partnership replaces robotic interactive voice response (IVR) systems and hold queues with 24/7/365 voice agents that handle routine interactions, freeing human agents for complex, high-value conversations.
Rime CEO and co-founder Lily Clifford framed the ambition in scale terms: 'Partnering with Dialpad allows us to bring hyper-realistic, emotionally expressive voice AI to businesses on a massive scale.' Walker added his own concern about the industry's direction: 'It would be a really tragic experience if the whole world goes agentic and everything sounds the same.' The partnership follows Rime's $24 million Series A led by M13 â with Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital, and Unusual Ventures participating â and marks one of the largest platform-wide voice AI integrations to date, positioning voice quality as a brand differentiator rather than a commodity layer in enterprise AI stacks.
