Turner Gauntt

@usebland

[Design Arena @DesignArena]

BREAKING: Bland Speech v3 by @usebland debuts as the most human-sounding TTS model on our newest evaluation: Audio Realism Bench.

Traditional speech benchmarks increasingly struggle to separate frontier systems that all sound clean, fluent, and intelligible.

Audio Realism Bench instead asks a harder question: when two voices read the same transcript, which one sounds more like a real person?

Vetted native speakers evaluate recordings blindly across phone agents, conversational assistants, and spoken explainers, judging the subtle qualities that define human-like speech.

We also place real human recordings directly into the evaluation pool, testing whether evaluators can distinguish TTS models from actual human speech.

Bland Speech v3 takes the top spot in our initial rankings, followed by MAI-Voice-2 by @MicrosoftAI and Grok TTS by @SpaceXAI, all demonstrating important steps toward voice systems capable of sustaining genuinely human-feeling interactions.

Congratulations to the @usebland team!

[Turner Gauntt @tgauntt36]

@usebland ☎️ 🚗

[Bland @usebland]

Our recent $100M Series C means we can continue training our models to handle the urgent, high-risk, 45-minute phone calls that matter most.

We brought Paul back to explain what this means and why he might be headed back to Costa Rica…

[Turner Gauntt @tgauntt36]

@usebland Just getting started ☎️

[Bland @usebland]

Yesterday, we announced that we closed our Series C. Hear from our CEO, Isaiah Granet, about what this means for the team:

[Turner Gauntt @tgauntt36]

@usebland Thanks paul

[Bland @usebland]

Today, we’re announcing that we’ve closed our Series C and raised $100M to continue automating the world’s most complex phone calls.

We grabbed some guy named Paul to talk about it because nobody else in the office wanted to. 🧵

[Soulja Boy @souljaboy]

I was the first rapper to automate his voice with AI. 

Give me a call

[Alex Cohen @anothercohen]

Well guys, AI was fun while it lasted.

Calling the top

[Turner Gauntt @tgauntt36]

@usebland 🚗🚗🚗

[Bland @usebland]

Today we are unveiling SouljaAI.

The first rapper to automate their voice with AI.

Call Soulja Boy, or use his voice yourself 👇

[Bland @usebland]

We shipped a lot this year. 🚀

Here's a recap of our biggest product launches from 2025 and a preview of what's next in 2026.

Huge thanks to our customers, power users, and partners for building alongside us!

Read here: https://t.co/gOK675hkiK

[Bland @usebland]

We let college students do a live interview with AI.

Pass the interview → Get a job

Want to try it yourself?

Give Bland a call: https://t.co/XPOfec1gwM

[Bland @usebland]

Bland lets your AI speak any language. Now, we’re enabling your team to do the same.

Introducing Live Translate. Any language, any accent, handled by Bland.

[Bland @usebland]

We're thrilled to announce Dean Cormier has joined Bland as our Chief Sales Officer!

Dean has a legendary background, spending 15 years at Salesforce before leading Ironclad as their CSO from 10-100M.

[Bland @usebland]

Today we’re excited to introduce Bland TTS, the first voice AI to cross the uncanny valley.

Several months ago, our team solved one-shot style transfer of human speech. That means, from a single, brief MP3, you can clone any voice or remix another clone’s style (tone, cadence, or pronunciations, etc.).

With Bland TTS:

• Creatives can turn text into realistic sound effects or AI voice tracks with precise control over style and emotion.

• Developers can plug in our TTS API to build voice apps fully customized to their liking.

• Enterprises can launch AI-driven support lines that sound so natural — customers will save you as a contact (try talking to it on our site).

🧵Check out the thread below or visit our website to get started for free

[Mahmoud Serewel @msserewel]

I finally joined the b(l)andwagon and wrote my first substack post...

I ran through what an AI Deployment Engineer is. This is one of the most exciting seats you can be in in tech today, and we're hiring for it at Bland!

Read here (https://t.co/ZlZq7sRu4I)

Interested? Dm me!

[Bland @usebland]

What’s actually happening under the hood of voice AI?

We just dropped 3 deep dives on LLMs:

How they think (tokens → transformers)
How we keep them secure
How we stop jailbreaks
If you read this stuff for fun, we’re hiring AI Deployment Engineers.

$10K for a referral. 💸
Links in comments. 👇

[Isaiah Granet @zaygranet]

🏈 It didn’t cost $8M. And you never even saw our “Super Bowl ad”. But everyone's convinced they did... and it went viral anyways.

Over the past week, universities have been showing our ad to students.
Americans from across the country have been calling in to talk to our AI.
And enterprises flooded @Bland’s website.

💰But how did a startup afford an $8,000,000 ad slot?

We didn’t. And you probably never even saw it live 🧵