A voice AI company built on a stance.

Voice deserves craft. Artists deserve what music artists fought for. And how brands implement voice AI shapes how the public perceives AI itself.

Read the origin

Origin

Lyric started with frustration.

AI voices were getting more realistic, but less considered. Voices cloned from data without consent. Voices stripped from artists who never agreed to the deployment. Voices dropped into products without context, responsibility, or care.

The problems were stacking. Voice artists were watching their craft get scraped, cloned, and rebranded by platforms that gave them no credit, no rights, and no revenue. Brands were implementing voice AI in ways that flattened the medium and reinforced the public sense that AI was here to replace human creative work. The companies building voice models treated voice as output. Tuned for novelty. Optimized for speed. Disconnected from intent.

It wasn't a technology problem. It was an artist problem. An implementation problem. A design problem. Three problems, all reinforcing each other.

Lyric was built to refuse all three.

Voices on the Lyric imprint are partnerships. Real voice artists shape them, direct the performance, retain their rights, and earn as their voice carries forward. The AI carries their craft, with their consent, in the directions they sanction.

Brands using Lyric voices implement them with care. The standard isn't speed or scale. It's how the voice lands with the people who hear it, because how brands implement voice AI shapes how the public understands AI itself.

And every product Lyric makes, from Composer for content to Imprint for licensing, from Score for research to Opus for direction, alongside the daily Briefing that proves the voices in real editorial work, stems from the same belief. Voice deserves craft. Artists deserve what music artists fought for. Implementation matters.

The Blueprint

What Steve Stoute did for music, we're doing for voice.

Lyric's founders are fans of Steve Stoute and United Masters. We've watched him fight to give music artists ownership, attribution, and revenue participation in an industry that had stopped offering any of those things. We're doing the same for voice artists in the age of conversational AI.

Voice artists deserve what music artists fought for. Their work powers the AI voices reshaping how brands speak to the world. They should be credited. They should be paid. They should retain their rights. The Lyric imprint exists to make that the standard, not the exception.

The Team

The team behind lyric voices

Founded by Michael “Mike” Lang.LinkedIn

Lyric's founders have spent more than a decade designing voice and conversational AI for the world's most considered consumer brands. The work runs through Amazon and Google, and partnerships across automotive, travel, telecommunications, consumer electronics, and enterprise software. Some of it shipped. Much of it informed the products that did. All of it shaped how we think about voice AI now.

Here's one example. In 2024, Mike led the consumer voice experience design for JBL Authentics, the first consumer speaker to host Alexa and Google Assistant simultaneously. The product and its companion app earned a CES Innovation Award. The onboarding flow he designed achieved over ninety percent opt-in for voice setup. That result didn't come from model performance. It came from treating voice as a craft problem: how the system speaks, when it speaks, what it asks for, and how it earns the user's permission to keep speaking.

Mike's co-founders bring complementary backgrounds in AI engineering, voice product design, and the creative industries. Those are the disciplines required to build voice AI the way we believe it should be built. As a craft, not a benchmark.

Our founders shaped voice AI at