Phonic's voice AI acts while you're still talking — in 50 languages

Phonic introduced Phonic-1 on October 29, a speech-to-speech model built for agentic phone tasks, alongside a $27.5 million Series A led by First Round that brings its total funding to $31.5 million.

The pitch is a voice agent that does not wait for the caller to finish: Phonic says Phonic-1 calls tools while the caller is still talking, answers in about 600 milliseconds, and holds one voice across 50-plus languages and mid-conversation language switches — and it topped Artificial Analysis's Speech to Speech Index at 87.1, a hair ahead of Grok Voice 3.0 at 86.9.

The independent check comes with a caveat the headline skips: Phonic ranked only eighth of 30 models on human preference in the same index's arena ratings, so the fastest, most capable phone agent on the benchmarks is not yet the one people most like talking to.