smallest.ai vs Speechify

Smallest.ai Lands $13M Series A for Voice AI

Smallest.ai, a voice AI startup founded in 2023, announced a $13 million Series A funding round on July 31, 2026, led by Seligman Ventures with participation from Sierra Ventures and 3one4 Capital. Additional backers included Better Capital, Upsparks Capital, Schema Ventures, Tiny VC, DeVC and Mission Street Capital. Total funding now exceeds $21 million. The capital will advance a real-time speech-to-speech system designed to reduce latency in enterprise voice interactions, targeting financial services, healthcare and contact centers. The round followed the launch of Lightning V3, V3.1 and V3.2, adding 15-language support, production voice cloning from five seconds of audio, and instruction-following controls. The company highlighted its Hydra asynchronous architecture, which processes listening, reasoning, acting and responding in parallel. Smallest.ai also referenced a May hardware partnership with Tenstorrent for cost-efficient inference.

• Smallest.ai raised $13M in Series A funding led by Seligman Ventures.
• Total funding surpassed $21 million after the round closed on July 30, 2026.
• The round included Sierra Ventures, 3one4 Capital, Better Capital, Upsparks Capital, Schema Ventures, Tiny VC, DeVC and Mission Street Capital.

Smallest.ai raises $13M for humanlike voice AI

Smallest.ai, a startup founded in late 2024, raised $13 million in a Series A round to develop a small, voice-specific AI model intended for real-time conversational agents that sound human. The round was led by Seligman Ventures with participation from Sierra Ventures and 3one4 Capital, bringing total funding to over $21 million. Smallest.ai's approach uses a lightweight real-time voice model for immediate interaction and falls back to larger foundational LLMs when needed. The company targets enterprise customer support use cases—handling accents, multiple languages, and noisy environments—and counts RingCentral and Truecaller among existing customers. Competitors named include ElevenLabs, Cartesia and regional player Sarvam. Sudarshan Kamath is founder and CEO.

• Smallest.ai raised $13 million in a Series A round led by Seligman Ventures.
• Series A participants include Sierra Ventures and 3one4 Capital.
• The funding brings Smallest.ai's total financing to over $21 million.

Fireflies adds dictation to desktop apps

Fireflies.ai, known for AI meeting notetaking, has launched Fireflies Talk, a dictation feature for its Mac and Windows apps. The feature allows users to press a hotkey (Fn on Mac, Ctrl+Win on Windows) to speak and have their words transcribed in any app. Fireflies bundles this new capability into existing subscription plans at no extra cost, positioning it as an expansion beyond meetings to email, Slack, docs, and other work contexts. The company emphasizes privacy by storing transcripts locally and not keeping recordings. The move aligns with Fireflies' broader strategy to automate workflows and build an AI assistant that leverages meeting context and user data. The feature competes with dedicated dictation apps like Wispr Flow, Willow, and Superwhisper.

• Fireflies.ai launched Fireflies Talk, a dictation feature for Mac and Windows apps.
• The feature is available via Fn key on Mac and Ctrl+Win on Windows.
• Fireflies Talk is bundled into existing subscription plans at no extra cost.

Speechify SIMBA 3.2 Featured in SourceForge Analysis of Voice AI Quality, Latency, and Cost

Speechify SIMBA 3.2 was featured in a SourceForge analysis and also covered by VentureBeat after topping two independent voice AI leaderboards.

Speechify SIMBA 3.2 Featured in VentureBeat After Topping Two Independent Voice AI Leaderboards

Speechify's SIMBA 3.2 has been featured in VentureBeat after topping two independent voice AI leaderboards.