Murf AI Launches Falcon 2 Voice Model to Challenge ElevenLabs and OpenAI at Fifth of the Price

India's Murf AI launches Falcon 2 to challenge voice AI leaders

Bangalore-based Murf AI is releasing its Falcon 2 voice model on 20 August at $0.01 per generated minute, a fifth of what ElevenLabs charges. The company says it scores above some OpenAI models on the independent Artificial Analysis leaderboard. A Bangalore company is selling synthetic speech at a fifth of what Europe's biggest voice AI startup charges. Murf AI makes its Falcon 2 model public on 20 August, priced at $0.01 for every generated minute. At volume that is the entire argument. A million minutes of speech costs $10,000 on Falcon 2, against $50,000 on ElevenLabs Turbo and Flash. The performance claim is what makes the price interesting. Murf says Falcon 2 scores above some OpenAI entries, including its Realtime API, on the independent Artificial Analysis leaderboard, and responds in under 100 milliseconds. That claim deserves a beat of patience. The model is not publicly available until Thursday, and the comparison is a company pointing at a third-party leaderboard rather than anyone testing it in production. It is also the second time in nine months. Murf launched the first Falcon in November 2025 with a press release saying it outperformed ElevenLabs at 55 millisecond latency. The company behind it is not a weekend project. Founded in 2020 by three IIT Kharagpur engineers, backed by Matrix Partners and Elevation Capital, it claims 10 million users and 300 corporate customers including Cisco, Pfizer, Nestlé and Air France-KLM. The reason this matters in Europe is who it is aimed at. ElevenLabs is the continent's flagship AI company, in talks at a $22bn valuation and built on the argument that its voices are the best available. Murf is competing on trust too, not only on cost. Chief operating officer Sneha Roy says the company works with real voice actors who consent to the use of their voices, with transparent contracts, ongoing royalties and data protection. European institutions have already picked a side, with money. Poland took an $11mn stake in ElevenLabs, and the UK government signed an agreement to use its voice AI in public services. The rest of Falcon 2 is enterprise plumbing. It offers data residency in 11 countries, deployment inside a customer's own cloud, up to 10,000 concurrent calls, and training on live customer calls and booking flows rather than scripted narration. Europe has been selling quality and trust while assuming price would follow. A model claiming comparable benchmarks at a fifth of the cost is the first serious test of that order.

India startup aims to compete with OpenAI in crowded voice arena

Murf AI has launched Falcon 2, a text-to-speech model designed to deliver human-like voices at lower costs and faster speeds. Priced at $0.01 per generated minute, the model has outperformed some offerings from OpenAI and other global players in independent benchmarks, targeting enterprise use cases such as call centres, banks and airlines. A Bangalore-based startup has entered the crowded race to build artificial voices that sound human, with an AI model that garners high scores versus systems from OpenAI and ElevenLabs Inc. Murf AI's text-to-speech Falcon 2, publicly available from August 20, ranked higher than some platforms from better-funded players such as OpenAI's Realtime API in benchmarks on Artificial Analysis, the independent platform that tracks AI performance. Like other voice foundation models, it aims to provide big savings for users like call centres, banks and airlines, which hope to employ the technology to handle large volumes of customer communications. Falcon 2 is priced at $0.01 per generated minute -- a fifth of the price of larger competitors such as ElevenLabs -- making it attractive for conversational AI and real-time voice agents. It's also faster than many competitors, responding in under 100 milliseconds. Murf AI was founded in 2020 by the engineer trio of Sneha Roy, Ankur Edkie and Divyanshu Pandey, alumni of the premier Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. The Matrix Partners and Elevation Capital-backed startup serves over 10 million users in 300 companies including Honeywell International Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Pfizer Inc., VMware, Nestle SA and Air France-KLM. Falcon 2 was in limited release to select clients ahead of the broader rollout. The startup's India-based engineering team developed the platform to take on a central challenge in real-time voice AI: balancing natural-sounding speech with faster speeds and lower prices. It supports over 150 voices in more than 35 languages, the company said. "For years, the most important AI models have largely emerged from the US," Roy, Murf AI's chief operating officer, said in a statement. Falcon 2 is "competing directly with established global models on independent benchmarks, while being engineered around the economics and deployment requirements of enterprise production." The price difference becomes noticeable at scale. For every million minutes of generated speech, Falcon 2 costs $10,000, compared with $50,000 for ElevenLabs Turbo and Flash. Falcon 2's training included real-world interactions such as live customer calls and booking flows rather than just scripted narration. It's built to interpret the meaning of a sentence while adjusting pace, emphasis and pronunciation around the context. "We work with real voice actors who consent to having their voices used, with transparent contracts, ongoing royalties and data protection," Roy said in an interview via email. The startup says its model improves voice delivery on details that confound many AI systems, such as currencies, dates, addresses and license plate numbers. It can handle as many as 10,000 calls concurrently, Murf AI said. It will provide cloud support for data to reside in 11 geographies, and also offers deployment within in-house clouds for greater security.