Filed under Voice · 2019
Lyrebird
2017 - 2019, 2 years old
A Montreal voice-cloning startup that recreated a speaker's voice from a one-minute sample.
Lyrebird spun out of Yoshua Bengio's MILA lab in 2017 and immediately became one of the cautionary tales of the deepfake era, after demos of synthesized Obama and Trump voices circulated widely. The team built a consumer voice-cloning site and a developer API, but never found a business that scaled beyond novelty. Descript bought the company in September 2019 and retired the Lyrebird product, putting the team to work on an audio-editor feature called Overdub. The standalone Lyrebird site was redirected to Descript shortly afterward, and the brand was retired.
- Founded
- 2017-04
- Shut down
- 2019-09-18
- Funding raised
- Undisclosed
- Years alive
- 2
- Founders
- Alexandre de Brebisson, Kundan Kumar, Jose Sotelo