The Future of Enterprise Voice AI with Lily Clifford, Rime
Rime founder Lily Clifford explains enterprise voice AI, speech-to-speech models, conversational AI, voice agents, enterprise voice infrastructure and why natural conversation is becoming the next interface for computing.
Table of contents
What does it take to build AI that people actually want to talk to? According to Rime founder Lily Clifford, the future of voice AI is not just generating realistic speech. It's creating conversations that understand context, respond naturally, and help enterprises build better customer experiences. In this episode of The Flywheel, M13 Partner Morgan Blumberg talks with the Stanford-trained linguist about speech-to-speech models, enterprise voice infrastructure, conversational AI, voice agents, linguistics, and why voice will become one of the primary interfaces for computing. Lily explains why Rime trains its models on real conversations instead of scripted speech and why enterprise developers increasingly need flexible AI building blocks rather than one-size-fits-all voice applications.
Through the conversation, Morgan Blumberg explores why M13 believes enterprise AI will increasingly be built around natural, multimodal interactions between people and intelligent systems.
Key insights
Why enterprise voice AI requires more than realistic voices
The biggest challenge in enterprise voice AI is not making voices sound human. It's creating conversations that understand timing, context, interruptions, tool calls, and human expectations throughout an interaction.
Why enterprises are building their own voice stacks
As voice becomes a core customer experience, more enterprises will build customized voice applications using foundational AI building blocks rather than buying generic off-the-shelf solutions.
Why speech-to-speech models change enterprise software
Next-generation speech models combine speech understanding, speech generation and tool use into a unified system, making conversations more natural and reducing latency across customer interactions.
Why linguistics matters in AI
Rime's founders come from linguistics, speech science and machine learning, leading the company to prioritize real conversational behavior over benchmark performance alone.
Related topics
What is Rime?
Rime is an enterprise conversational voice AI company building speech models for high stakes conversations. Its technology powers nearly 100 million monthly calls and are designed for customer support, healthcare, financial services and other high-trust applications.
What is a speech-to-speech model?
A speech-to-speech model listens, understands and generates spoken language within a single AI system. Unlike traditional voice pipelines that separate speech recognition, language models and text-to-speech, a speech-to-speech model lets AI listen and respond directly with speech instead of separate transcription, language, and speech generation steps, making conversations faster and more natural.
Why is enterprise voice AI different from consumer voice assistants?
Enterprise voice AI must integrate with business systems, complete tasks, make API calls and maintain reliable customer experiences across millions of interactions. Natural conversation is only one part of building production-ready enterprise voice applications.
Why are enterprises building their own voice AI?
As voice becomes a strategic customer interface, enterprises increasingly want to own their customer experience instead of relying on generic voice software. AI building blocks make it possible to customize voice applications around unique workflows, products and customer journeys.
What industries use enterprise voice AI?
Enterprise voice AI is increasingly used in customer support, healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, logistics and other industries where conversational interfaces help customers complete complex tasks.
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At a glance
There are no Cinderella stories. Blockbuster venture successes are always preceded by years of sleepless nights.”
There are no Cinderella stories. Blockbuster venture successes are always preceded by years of sleepless nights.”
—Sarah Tomolonius, M13 Partner & Head of Investor Relations
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