Phonic's New Voice Model Tops Agentic AI Speech Benchmark

Phonic's Phonic-1 voice model scored 87.1 on the Artificial Analysis speech-to-speech index, surpassing xAI's Grok Voice 3.0, and completed 79.9% of customer-service simulations with 0.61 seconds to first audio. The model can execute tool lookups and bookings while a user is still talking, responding 1.1 seconds after a caller stopped in a demo compared to 15.7 seconds for OpenAI's GPT-Live. Phonic, a 10-person startup, raised $27.5M in a Series A led by First Round, bringing total funding to $31.5M, and its speech technology powers AI job interviews for Ashby across 25 countries.