Murf AI Launches Low-Cost Voice Model Falcon 2
Bengaluru startup targets call centres and voice agents with rapid speech generation priced below larger rivals.
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Bengaluru-based Murf AI has released Falcon 2, a text-to-speech model aimed at companies deploying large volumes of automated voice interactions, entering a market led by firms including ElevenLabs and OpenAI.
Falcon 2 became publicly available on August 20 after a limited rollout to selected customers.
On Artificial Analysis’s listener-rated naturalness benchmark, Falcon 2 scored above OpenAI’s GPT-Realtime-2 and ElevenLabs’ Flash model, although it trailed ElevenLabs v3.
Murf charges $0.01 per minute of generated speech. ElevenLabs lists its Flash and Turbo models at about $0.05 per minute. On that basis, one million minutes would cost about $10,000 with Falcon 2 and $50,000 with ElevenLabs.
Murf said the model can begin responding in under 100 milliseconds, a measure that matters for applications such as customer-service calls where delays can make conversations feel unnatural.
The model offers more than 150 voices across over 35 languages and can support up to 10,000 simultaneous calls, according to the company. It is aimed at banks, airlines, call centers and businesses building conversational AI systems.
Murf said Falcon 2 was trained for conversational uses such as customer calls and booking interactions, rather than only scripted narration. It adjusts pronunciation, pace and emphasis according to context, including when reading dates, currencies, addresses and license-plate numbers.
“Falcon 2 is competing directly with established global models on independent benchmarks, while being engineered around the economics and deployment requirements of enterprise production,” Chief Operating Officer Sneha Roy said in a statement.
Roy co-founded Murf in 2020 with fellow IIT Kharagpur alumni Ankur Edkie and Divyanshu Pandey. The company is backed by Matrix Partners and Elevation Capital.
Roy said Murf licenses voices from actors under agreements covering consent, royalties and data protection. The company also offers data residency across 11 geographies and private-cloud or on-premises deployment for customers seeking greater control over voice data.
