# Gradium — New voices: how we pick the one that wins

- Company: Gradium (gradium.ai)
- Announced: 2026-08-04
- Category: not stated
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: announcements
- Source: https://gradium.ai/blog/new-voices-how-we-pick-the-one-that-wins
- Record: https://forck.live/items/18308-new-voices-how-we-pick-the-one-that-wins
- Subject: Gradium TTS / Phonon

Choosing a voice is a casting decision. Ask customers how they make it and it comes down to gut feeling. They play a few candidates for a room of stakeholders and someone eventually says "that's the one." Roughly one candidate in a thousand has what we call the hit factor. A big catalog doesn't help either because everyone in the room hears "good" differently, and the more candidates there are, the harder that first listen gets. We can still measure subjective preferences. Gradium's voice pipeline generates candidates on demand against a specific use case, then surfaces the one that performs best for it. How we decide which voices to build Every voice starts as a written target. Demand sets which targets we pick up: deals in flight, customer feedback, gaps in locale coverage. A target category names six things: Use case moves the result more than any other axis. Ask US English listeners to rate voices for customer support and more effusive, higher-pitched female voices tend to win. Ask the same listeners about long-form narration and it inverts, with lower-pitched male voices and slower, more even delivery coming out on top. …

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