According to reports from Business Standard, Murf AI's text-to-speech Falcon 2, publicly available from August 20, ranked higher than some platforms from better-funded players such as OpenAI's Realtime API in benchmarks on Artificial Analysis, the independent platform that tracks AI performance. The Bangalore-based startup's Falcon 2 is priced at $0.01 per generated minute - a fifth of the price of larger competitors such as ElevenLabs and responds in under 100 milliseconds, making it attractive for conversational AI and real-time voice agents. As reported by Moneycontrol, Falcon 2 was in limited release to select clients ahead of the broader rollout to ensure optimal performance before public availability.
As reported by Business Standard, the price difference becomes noticeable at scale, with Falcon 2 costing $10,000 for every million minutes of generated speech compared with $50,000 for ElevenLabs Turbo and Flash. The startup's India-based engineering team developed the platform to address the central challenge in real-time voice AI: balancing natural-sounding speech with faster speeds and lower prices. Falcon 2 supports over 150 voices in more than 35 languages and can handle as many as 10,000 calls concurrently. According to Moneycontrol, the model aims to provide significant savings for users like call centers, banks and airlines, which hope to employ the technology to handle large volumes of customer communications.
According to Business Standard, Murf AI was founded in 2020 by the engineer trio of Sneha Roy, Ankur Edkie and Divyanshu Pandey, alumni of the premier Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. The Matrix Partners and Elevation Capital-backed startup serves over 10 million users in 300 companies including Honeywell International Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Pfizer Inc., VMware, Nestle SA and Air France-KLM. As reported by Moneycontrol, Falcon 2's training included real-world interactions such as live customer calls and booking flows rather than just scripted narration. The company's training approach provides more realistic and practical voice delivery capabilities compared to traditional scripted narration-based training methods.
As reported by Business Standard, Murf AI's Falcon 2 is built to interpret the meaning of a sentence while adjusting pace, emphasis and pronunciation around the context. The startup says its model improves voice delivery on details that confound many AI systems, such as currencies, dates, addresses and license plate numbers. According to Moneycontrol, "We work with real voice actors who consent to having their voices used, with transparent contracts, ongoing royalties and data protection," said Roy, the company's chief operating officer. The company works with real voice actors who consent to having their voices used, with transparent contracts, ongoing royalties and data protection. It will provide cloud support for data to reside in 11 geographies, and also offers deployment within in-house clouds for greater security.
As reported by Moneycontrol, "For years, the most important AI models have largely emerged from the US," Roy said in a statement. Falcon 2 is "competing directly with established global models on independent benchmarks, while being engineered around the economics and deployment requirements of enterprise production." The startup's approach represents a significant shift in the global voice AI landscape, with an India-based solution competing directly with established global models on performance metrics. This positions Murf AI as a key player in the international voice AI market, challenging traditional US-dominated models while offering competitive pricing and technical capabilities.
