Rime is a text-to-speech provider whose voice models are made for real-time conversations. Developers call it through an API with streaming over HTTP and WebSockets, choosing between the Mist v3 model for the lowest latency, with time to first audio around 37 ms at the median, and the Coda model for the most natural expression. More than 600 voices are available, with controls for accent, pace and tone, plus pronunciation and spelling tools that render names, addresses and alphanumerics correctly. Starter usage begins at $0.03 per 1,000 characters, roughly three cents per minute of audio.
The main audience is teams building voice agents: AI voice startups, contact center software vendors and enterprise engineering groups in banking, healthcare, hospitality and food ordering. Compliance-driven organizations can run the models in their own cloud, VPC or on-premises, and Enterprise plans include a BAA for HIPAA and SOC 2 reports. Product managers and linguists who care about how an agent sounds on the phone can tune voices to brand and industry rather than accept a generic voice.
Typical uses include phone agents that take restaurant orders, patient intake and appointment calls in healthcare, card services and banking support, and hotel guest communication. Rime works with voice-agent frameworks such as LiveKit, Pipecat and Twilio, so it slots in as the speech layer of an existing stack. It supports 50+ languages overall, with regional dialects, and word-level timestamps help agents handle interruptions properly. Self-hosting through Docker Compose or Kubernetes suits teams with strict latency or data residency needs. Enterprise customers can also create unlimited custom voice clones.
