10-person team Phonic releases speech model Phonic-1, claims it can query and book in parallel during calls
The 10-person startup Phonic has released a speech model, Phonic-1, which it says can execute queries and bookings before the caller has finished speaking. The model tops the Artificial Analysis speech-to-speech leaderboard with a score of 87.1, 0.2 points higher than xAI's Grok Voice 3.0, with a customer service task completion rate of 79.9% and a first-audio latency of 0.61 seconds. Phonic says it scored 90.2 on the Cekura call test set, but the public Cekura leaderboard lists Phonic v1 at 68.3%; the company has completed a $27.5 million Series A round led by First Round, bringing total funding to $31.5 million.
Why read this
AI score 66
The original text provides comparison data on the speech model's parallel tool calling during calls and first-audio latency, offering a view of how the interaction rhythm of speech agents is changing.
Topics
View original postIntroducing Phonic-1, the most advanced speech-to-speech model for agentic tasks — from @phonic_co, the speech-to-speech model company. We’ve had a breakout year and raised a $27.5M Series A led by @firstround with participation from @Lux_Capital, @felicis, and Definition. https://t.co/syYLXbQ4lL
View original
Introducing Phonic-1, the most advanced speech-to-speech model for agentic tasks — from @phonic_co, the speech-to-speech model company. We’ve had a breakout year and raised a $27.5M Series A led by @firstround with participation from @Lux_Capital, @felicis, and Definition. https://t.co/syYLXbQ4lL
Body
A 10-person startup Phonic has released Phonic-1, which it says is the only voice model that can run lookups and bookings while the caller is still mid-sentence.
> First on Artificial Analysis’s speech-to-speech index at 87.1, just 0.2 points above xAI’s Grok Voice 3.0, completing 79.9% of customer-service tasks with 0.61 seconds to first audio.
> Phonic-1 calls tools while the caller is still talking; in the demo it finished 5 lookups mid-speech and replied 1.1 seconds after the caller stopped, versus 15.7 seconds for OpenAI’s GPT-Live.
> Phonic reports 90.2 on Cekura’s call suite, beating a transcribe-think-speak cascade at 82.9% that outscores every ranked speech-to-speech model there, though Cekura’s public board lists Phonic v1 at 68.3%.
> They raised a $27.5M Series A led by First Round, taking total funding to $31.5M, and Phonic already powers Ashby’s AI job interviews in 25 countries.
https://t.co/laxOzIhDwx