At Rime, their mission is simple but ambitious: to make voice AI truly human. They believe voice interfaces should sound and feel like talking to another human. They should be intuitive, natural, and responsive. That’s why they built Mist, their next-generation text-to-speech (TTS) engine designed to deliver ultra-realistic, emotionally expressive speech for real-world applications.

Today, Oracle is highlighting one of the most impactful applications of Rime’s technology: healthcare. In this post, I am sharing how Rime’s voice AI is being used by healthcare providers to improve patient communication, streamline operations, and reduce administrative load, all powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

When building voice applications that interact directly with people, especially in sensitive domains like healthcare, the quality and realism of the voice matters immensely. A robotic voice or one that can’t pronounce names, IDs, or medications can feel cold, frustrating, or even untrustworthy. That’s where Rime is truly differentiated. Their Mist TTS engine doesn’t just “say” words—it delivers them with speed, clarity, accuracy and warmth, creating experiences that feel human and build trust.

Rime in the Voice AI Stack

Rime sits at the heart of the voice AI stack, which typically consists of three core components:

  • Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR): Converts spoken language into text.
  • Text Understanding: Uses LLMs and business logic to interpret meaning and intent.
  • Text-to-Speech (TTS): Converts that understanding back into spoken language.

Rime specializes in the final layer, TTS, but they’re increasingly building connective tissue across the stack to enable seamless, intelligent conversations that feel effortless and human.

Why Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)?

As a high-performance AI company with a lean team, infrastructure makes or breaks companies like Rime. They evaluated multiple platforms and ultimately chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) because of its unmatched price-performance, scalability, and valuable support. After moving to OCI from their prior provider, they have seen a 3x increase in price-performance while scaling up their workloads from dozens to hundreds of GPUs.

OCI’s infrastructure allows Rime to iterate fast, training and deploying their cutting-edge voice models without getting bogged down in infrastructure issues. One of their ML engineers summed it up perfectly:

“For their part, the OCI turnkey solution to training infra lets us, a team of four ML engineers in a nine-person startup, train these models rapidly. We’re not spending half our time debugging cluster issues. That just wasn’t the case with other cloud providers, where most of our time went into setup, figuring out permissions, and other tedious overhead.”

OCI gives Rime the freedom to innovate without the operational drag. And because Oracle’s success is tied directly to its customers’ success, the level of support they’ve received has been outstanding.

Voice AI in Healthcare: A Deep Dive

Healthcare is one of the most compelling and meaningful applications of Rime’s technology. Medical providers are using Rime to enhance how they connect with patients, streamline operations, and reduce the administrative burden on staff. Here’s how:

  • Automated Appointment Scheduling: Patients can schedule, confirm, or reschedule appointments using natural, human-like voice interfaces—no more hold music or touch-tone menus required.
  • Reminders and Test Results: Deliver timely, empathetic reminders and lab result notifications that feel personal and respectful.
  • Voice-Powered Payments: Patients can pay for services securely over the phone, using conversational interactions instead of complex menus. Rime has trained their models on proprietary in-studio conversations to accurately pronounce credit card numbers, patient IDs, and more, which just isn’t possible when training exclusively on publicly available data online.
  • Revenue Cycle Management (RCM): Providers can help automate insurance verification, claims submission, and follow-ups with payors, which reduces claim denials, speeding up reimbursements, and keeping both patients and insurers in the loop.

All of this is powered by the speed, reliability, and flexibility of OCI. When healthcare providers can trust the voice on the other end of the line and when patients feel like they’re speaking to someone who understands them, it changes the whole experience.

Beyond Healthcare

While healthcare is a key focus, Rime’s voice AI is transforming other sectors too:

  • Customer Support: Natural-sounding voices lead to faster resolutions and higher satisfaction.
  • Fast-Food Ordering: Conversational AI streamlines ordering experiences in drive-thrus and over the phone.
  • Outbound Calling: Personalized voice campaigns drive better engagement and conversion rates.

Rime delivers high-quality, emotionally intelligent voice synthesis for all of these use cases. With Oracle as their infrastructure partner, they are able to create trustworthy, emotionally resonant conversations at scale.

This is written by Sanjay Basu, Senior Director of OCI AI Services, in collaboration with Lily Clifford, CEO & Co-founder of Rime

Try Rime’s voices for conversational IVR, news reading, and more for free. Learn more about OCI AI infrastructure at oracle.com/ai-infra or speak to an AI expert.