by Adam Pease
Neosapience, a Korean company that offers generated voice and video content, recently secured $21.5M in its B round of funding. Its service leverages AI to generate the human voice, enabling enterprises to make use of vocal performances without needing to hire a dedicated voice actor. This blog discusses Neosapience and what its funding may bring to the AI market.
Generative Content Goes Mainstream
While AI researchers and artists have been experimenting with the power of algorithms to generate content, this has not been explored in a major way within the enterprise. Last year, in Aragon’s Research Note about emerging trends in the computer vision market, we highlighted the rise of generative content through generative adversarial networks (GANs), which have been used for some time to synthesize images of human faces for the purpose of advertising.
Photo captured from https://neosapience.com/
But Neosapience is taking things a step further and potentially reaching a wider audience with its offering. Its cloud-based generative content service Typecast enables enterprises to generate synthetic voices that can read from a script. Before its recent round of funding, Neosapience raised the stakes, adding in synthetic video technology that creates a video of an artificial human speaking to go along with the audio track. With more funding under its belt, Neosapience is marketing its services to enterprise buyers who are looking for ways to streamline and automate their production of rich media content. Neosapience is not the only vendor in the space, with several other players making a mark in this emerging market. Synthesia, another generative content provider, raised $50M in its B round last year.
The Future of Generative Content: Metaverse and Video
Neosapience’s product taps into two broader market trends Aragon has noticed in the past. For one, its publicity is timely with the increased attention to enterprise metaverses, which aim to augment traditional experiences with virtual worlds and avatars. Neosapience shows that the process of creating a fully synthetic avatar can be made efficient and scalable, which positions it well to advertise itself as a metaverse play.
More importantly, Neosapience takes advantage of the growing demand for video in the enterprise. Aragon has found that video is one of the fastest-growing areas of content, with more enterprises making use of video to support both internal employee engagement and external customer communications. For enterprises that need to quickly deploy and iterate video content to match the timeline of a product launch, Neosapience provides a no-code solution to video content automation that transforms the classic approach to video production. For use cases like onboarding, constructing a rich media internal company knowledge base, or quickly building out a customer service user experience, synthetic voice and video could be a valuable investment.
Bottom Line
We are only at the very beginning of the era of generative content. As algorithms increase in sophistication and become capable of producing more complex and detailed video content, we can expect that more use cases will crop up. In the meantime, Neosapience is well-positioned to compete in this emerging market.