Samsung has acquired Innoetics, a start up based out of Greece. Innoetics has developed text-to-speech and voice-to-speech technology that can listen to a person speaking, train on what that person is saying, and then read out a piece of completely unrelated text in that same voice.

The financial details of this buyout deal were not disclosed yet, but Samsung reportedly paid under $43 million for the acquisition.


"Samsung has agreed to acquire Innoetics. Samsung is always exploring ways to deepen our relationships with companies like Innoetics whose technologies present an opportunity to strengthen Samsung’s capabilities,” Samsung told TechCrunch in an emailed statement.

Innoetics was founded in 2006 and delves in developing character-heavy and expressive synthetic voices that can read aloud audiobooks, act in games, or even narrate fairy tales.

“The team has amazing foundational technology in text-to-speech. The synthesized voices are so accurate you almost can’t tell the difference between it and the real voice," said the Kostas Mallios, an ex-Microsoftie from Seattle who had started working with Innoetics six months ago.

Innoetics technology revolves around making AI speech more human-like in future products. Samsung has made many acquisitions in the past, and the recent one in the voice-based tech field includes startup Viv Labs. The expertise from this startup was used to design and launch its own assistant Bixby this year.