AI voice startup WellSaid Labs is doubling down on its niche of enterprise customers and regulated industries — hoping that a more judicious, behind-the-scenes approach will pay off for its business in the long run even as flashier rivals draw widespread attention and controversy.
The company, based in Bellevue, Wash., launched a new version of its text-to-speech AI voice platform Monday with redesigned Studio software and its next-generation Caruso voice model, promising better workflows, improved audio quality, and fine-tuned controls, among other features.
Unlike open voice-generation models that scrape public data, WellSaid’s system is trained exclusively on licensed voice actor recordings, a closed-model approach that it says respects intellectual property and appeals to sectors such as healthcare, legal, and finance.
WellSaid’s latest release is a pivotal moment for the company — the result of years of internal research now coming to market in a form that refines its focus on business and institutional users, said Chris Johnson, WellSaid’s chief product and technology officer, in an interview.
“We put our stake in the ground in being the best solution for enterprises in the market,” Johnson said. “A lot of these innovations accrue to making that a reality for us.”
WellSaid, which spun out of Seattle’s AI2 Incubator in 2019, works with large enterprise customers including LinkedIn, T-Mobile, ServiceNow, and Accenture.
The company made an impression on the public in 2023 when NPR’s Planet Money used WellSaid’s technology to create a synthetic version of former host Robert Smith’s voice — a near-perfect replica that surprised listeners and showed both the promise and potential challenges of realistic AI audio.
But WellSaid has struggled at times to break into the larger industry conversation. The challenge was underscored by its absence from a CB Insights market map of leading voice-AI startups — topped by buzzy ElevenLabs, which has been at the center of controversy over the use of its technology to make fake AI voices of public figures and others.
WellSaid executives say they’re hoping to correct that specific oversight, but the challenge reflects a broader pattern among enterprise AI companies, particularly those in the Seattle region — which often emphasize trust, governance, and regulatory scenarios in a tech culture still captivated by headline-generating Silicon Valley experiments and consumer apps.
The company employs about 70 people, down slightly from a year ago, according to LinkedIn data.
WellSaid has seen some turnover in its executive suite, including three CEOs in less than two years — starting with founder Matt Hocking, then Brian Cook, and now Benjamin Dorr, who succeeded Cook earlier this year after serving as chief financial officer.
“Every voice is connected to a real person, and that person receives royalties from the revenue that’s generated on WellSaid,” Dorr said on a recent episode of the Master Move podcast. “I think the things we do right by our voice actors allow us to do right by the enterprises that choose us, and I don’t think everyone else can say that.”
