Phonic AI: Phonic-1 Voice Agents & Pricing

Phonic AI builds speech-to-speech voice agents on its Phonic-1 model, launched October 29, 2026. Pricing is per minute: $0.07 on Starter and $0.065 on Pro.

Quick answer: Phonic is a startup that only builds speech-to-speech models for voice agents, such as phone support lines. Its new model, Phonic-1, hears the caller’s audio directly instead of working from a transcript, and it can call tools while the caller is still talking. Phonic says it took the #1 spot on the Artificial Analysis Speech to Speech Index. Alongside the launch, the company announced a $27.5M Series A led by First Round. We checked the prices on the Phonic pricing page on November 2, 2026.

What Phonic-1 does differently

Most voice agents chain three models: one transcribes, one decides what to say and one speaks. Phonic argues that a transcript loses the frustration in a caller’s voice or a long pause before an answer. Phonic-1 replaces the chain with one model. According to Phonic’s docs and launch post, it offers:

• Tool calls mid-sentence: it can look things up while the caller speaks, so the answer is ready when they stop.
• Low latency: under 600ms from speech in to speech out, even on long calls.
• 50+ languages: it can switch language mid-call and keep the same voice.
• Accurate alphanumerics: better pronunciation of URLs, emails and codes.
• Enterprise basics: SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA with a BAA, zero data retention and a 99.9% uptime SLA.

On Sierra’s multilingual full-duplex τ³-Voice benchmark, Phonic reports 83.2 for Phonic-1, against 79.9 for GPT-Live-1 and 68.5 for Gemini 3.8 Live. In third-party blind tests, listeners still preferred a real human about 60% of the time, which Phonic openly lists as work to do.

Phonic AI Pricing (2026)

Plan	Price	Minimum	Includes
Starter	$0.07 a minute	None	10 concurrent calls, 10 agents, 3 seats, unlimited voices
Pro	$0.065 a minute	$200 a month (about 3,100 minutes)	50 concurrent calls, 50 agents, 30 seats, Slack Connect support
Enterprise	Custom	Volume discounts	Custom voices, on-prem or VPC, HIPAA BAAs, audit logs

The per-minute rate covers everything: Phonic doesn’t add LLM pass-through or per-token charges. That makes cost easy to forecast. A 5-minute support call costs about $0.35 on Starter. For a sense of how other real-time voice stacks compare, read our ElevenLabs Realtime vs GPT Realtime breakdown.

Who Phonic is for

Phonic is a developer and business tool, not a consumer app. Teams build agents through the API, TypeScript and Python SDKs, a CLI or a no-code agent builder, using the model ID phonic-1. Phonic says customers include Ashby, Maven AGI and Rho across support, healthcare, recruiting and logistics. If you just want a voice for videos or narration, a text-to-speech tool from our best free AI voice generators list is a better fit, and Voxtral 3 covers Mistral’s speech option.

Limitations

• No free plan: Starter has no minimum, but every minute is billed.
• Built for businesses: there’s no consumer chat app.
• Self-reported results: most benchmarks come from Phonic’s launch post.
• Naturalness gap: humans still beat it in blind listening tests.