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Lily Clifford
Founder and CEO · Rime
Speech synthesis Computational linguist
Clifford left a Stanford linguistics PhD to build voices that sound like real people on real phone calls, and they now handle more than a million requests a day.
Lily Clifford is founder and CEO of Rime, a speech synthesis company in San Francisco, California. She was a PhD student in computational linguistics at Stanford before leaving to build Rime in 2023.
Sociophonetics and synthetic voices
Her research was in sociophonetics, the study of how social and demographic factors shape speech. “People in Texas sound different from people in California, and we all pick up on these cues, consciously or not,” she told Cerebral Valley. She was also following multi-speaker speech synthesis research around 2019 and 2020. “I ended up dropping out because I wanted to hack on speech synthesis models, specifically for customer support,” she said.
A recording studio in Mid-Market
She recruited two friends as co-founders, Brooke Larson from Amazon Alexa and Ares Geovanos from the University of California, San Francisco, where he worked on brain-computer interfaces for people who had lost the ability to speak. They set up a recording studio in San Francisco's Mid-Market and collected a large dataset of two-way conversations. Text-to-speech, she likes to say, is “the OG generative AI.”