Alex Smola, a former distinguished scientist at Amazon, founded Boson AI, a Santa Clara-based startup set to launch Higgs RealTime, a real-time speech-to-speech model. The company has raised 70 million dollars and is backed by Chinese entrepreneur Su Hua and Temasek’s venture arm, the Singapore-based investment firm. Boson AI claims its models cost one-tenth the price of competitors while offering comparable performance, thanks to a full-stack approach allowing enterprises to train and deploy custom models in their own data centers. The startup is initially targeting finance, telecommunications, healthcare, and insurance sectors, where voice agents could automate customer support and sales interactions. Facing formidable competitors like OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft, all heavily investing in full-duplex voice models, Smola is betting on affordability and data control to differentiate.
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