Dialpad goes all-in with Rime

The first thing your customer hears

When an AI agent answers your phone, that voice is your brand. It carries the same weight as your homepage, your packaging, and your best salesperson's handshake. A serious wealth manager shouldn’t sound like a bubbly insurance mascot, and neither of them should sound like a machine reading a script.

Craig Walker, Dialpad's CEO and founder, put it plainly when we sat down with him: "It would be a really tragic experience if the whole world goes agentic and everything sounds the same."

We agree. Rime was founded by linguists because speech carries far more than words. It carries intent, emotion, hesitation, and identity. Shezan Kazi, Dialpad's VP of AI Products, described what that looks like in practice:

"You have researchers and scientists looking at a problem statement from a very technical point of view. And then you have a linguist step in, and they look at speech as language, how it transports a message and emotions. Bringing those perspectives together creates a unique product that we haven't seen anywhere else in the market."

Why Dialpad chose Rime

Dialpad ran one of the most thorough evaluations we've seen. In Shezan's words, "it's easier to list what we haven't tried." They tested the major vendors, open-source models, and the option of building their own.

"We analyzed all the other competitors in the space, and Rime sounded the best," Craig told us. "It felt the most natural. It felt the most human."

The details mattered too. Business communication lives on specifics: phone numbers read back digit by digit, account IDs, addresses, dates. Most speech models were trained for consumer content and stumble in conversations. Ours are purpose-built for this exact use case, trained on the largest conversational dataset in the market, and it's a big part of why Dialpad's team trusted us with their customers' first impression.

What Rime powers at Dialpad

Dialpad thinks about customer experience as the whole relationship, going well beyond the support queue. Craig's favorite example: calling your bank at 3 a.m. on Easter Sunday and actually getting something done. Closing an account, applying for a card, rebooking a flight an hour before departure. With Rime's voices inside Dialpad's agentic platform, those interactions happen around the clock, in a voice that sounds like the company you called, while human agents focus on the conversations that need them.

Every business on the platform gets a voice matched to its brand, whether that's a healthcare provider that needs warmth and patience or a bank that needs steadiness and precision.

Partnership beyond the deal cycle

This deal includes a direct feedback loop between our engineering teams. Dialpad's production traffic sharpens our models, and Dialpad gets new Rime capabilities the moment they ship. Shezan again: "The team at Rime took every feedback that we had, productized it, and made every model generation better. They didn't sell a roadmap. They listened."

That's how we intend to work with every partner, and it's why we're confident this one will keep compounding. Today's voice AI is the worst it will ever be. Tomorrow's will be better, and Dialpad's customers will hear it first.

To get the full scoop about the partnership, watch the full announcement video. To learn more about Rime, book a meeting with our team today.

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