A 10-person startup Phonic has released Phonic-1, which it says is the only voice model that can run lookups and bookings while the caller is still mid-sentence.
First on Artificial Analysis’s speech-to-speech index at 87.1, just 0.2 points above xAI’s Grok Voice 3.0, completing 79.9% of customer-service tasks with 0.61 seconds to first audio.
Phonic-1 calls tools while the caller is still talking; in the demo it finished 5 lookups mid-speech and replied 1.1 seconds after the caller stopped, versus 15.7 seconds for OpenAI’s GPT-Live.
Phonic reports 90.2 on Cekura’s call suite, beating a transcribe-think-speak cascade at 82.9% that outscores every ranked speech-to-speech model there, though Cekura’s public board lists Phonic v1 at 68.3%.
They raised a $27.5M Series A led by First Round, taking total funding to $31.5M, and Phonic already powers Ashby’s AI job interviews in 25 countries.