Tencent Cloud and Cartesia find a rare common voice in AI speech applications
Tencent Cloud is joining forces with US start-up Cartesia to bring low-latency, humanlike voice AI to markets from Southeast Asia to Africa
In a rare instance of China-US cooperation on a sensitive frontier technology, Tencent Holdings’ cloud unit has struck a partnership with San Francisco start-up Cartesia to develop next-generation voice artificial intelligence applications.
Tencent Cloud said in a statement on Tuesday that it had formed a “strategic partnership” with Cartesia, which last month raised US$100 million for its text-to-speech model, Sonic 3.
Tencent’s “enterprise-grade global real-time communication infrastructure” would be paired with Cartesia’s latest model to enable machines to speak in more than 40 languages with naturalistic human qualities, according to the company.
The collaboration aimed to support seamless AI voice applications “in diverse and challenging regions like Southeast Asia and Africa”, the company said.