IBM and speech AI company DeepGram entered into a new partnership last week to bring voice capabilities to WatsonX Orchestra, IBM’s platform designed for creating and managing AI agents in workflows.
This agreement marks IBM’s first collaboration with a dedicated voice technology provider.
Under the deal, DeepGram’s speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies will be embedded directly into WatsonX Orchestration’s agent builder.
Among the new capabilities, the companies said the integration will provide enterprise-grade transcription, real-time captioning, and natural-sounding voice interactions for digital agents.
The deal comes as companies look to integrate voice control into AI tools with rapid advances in large language models enabling voice agent capabilities and awareness.
“Voice is rapidly becoming the default interface between humans and technology, and enterprise deployments require a real-time platform that is accurate, low latency, and reliable at scale,” Scott Stephenson, co-founder and CEO of Deepgram, said in a statement. Press release.
“By embedding DeepGram inside WatsonX Orchestration Agent Builder, IBM customers can build voice agents and voice-enabled workflows on top of the real-time foundation that has been developed and refined over more than a decade,” he said.
DeepGram said its technology is built to handle day-to-day audio challenges such as background noise and a variety of speech patterns, with the tool supporting multiple languages, including several Arabic and Indian variants.
IBM and DeepGram said the integration will initially target use cases in customer support, call analytics and voice-driven data entry, with health care and finance cited as priority areas.
“This collaboration aims to help enterprise organizations accelerate their AI initiatives and strengthen IBM’s open ecosystem, bringing choice and cutting-edge voice technology to partners and customers,” said Nick Holda, IBM’s vice president of AI technology partnerships, in the press release.
For Deepgram, the deal expands its access to IBM’s enterprise client base. For IBM, it adds an expert voice layer to WatsonX at a time when conversational AI interfaces are becoming a standard expectation in enterprise deployments.
