Vocal Image Leverages AI to Improve Communication Skills

Vocal Image, an Estonian startup with 4 million app downloads, is focused on improving voice and communication skills through AI-powered coaching. CEO Nick Lakhoika passionately conveys the company’s mission, which has garnered 160,000 active users.

Originally from Belarus, Lakhoika moved to Estonia without knowing English and faced challenges such as speaking anxiety. Despite this, he has triumphed in various pitch competitions for his voice coaching startup, drawing inspiration from his personal experiences shared with TechCrunch.

“I was teased for my unclear speech in school,” Lakhoika recalled. In his early twenties, he recognized the transformative benefits of voice training while working with vocal coach Maryna “Rusia” Shukiurava.

To support others facing similar hurdles, they created a YouTube channel that evolved into Vocal Image, offering a subscription-based app as an affordable alternative to in-person coaching, easily accessible from home. “You can experiment with unique movements and sounds with confidence,” Lakhoika highlighted.

Vocal Image features an interactive library of tongue twisters, breathing exercises, and gestures, increasingly utilizing AI to provide automated feedback and personalized insights, thanks to the contributions of co-founder and CTO Mikalai Karaliou, according to Lakhoika.

The guided experiences primarily focus on enhancing professional skills such as leadership, public speaking, and presentation abilities. Vocal Image also aids individuals aiming to boost their self-esteem, particularly among the LGBTQ community, a cause supported by Shukiurava in Belarus.

Though the founders are originally from Belarus, they epitomize a wider group of expatriates who left following significant crackdowns on anti-regime protests by President Alexander Lukashenko. Lakhoika chose Estonia for its conducive business environment, which has greatly benefitted the startup.

Shortly after arriving in Tallinn, Vocal Image joined the local accelerator Startup Wise Guys, becoming recognized as a success story due to its swift growth. Lakhoika mentioned that the startup reached $6.5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) with less than $1 million in pre-seed funding.

Recently, the company secured $3.6 million in a seed funding round led by French edtech VC Educapital, with support from Estonia’s Specialist VC and Germany’s Generations Fund, as reported by TechCrunch.

As of August, the startup reported $12 million in ARR and approximately 50,000 paying subscribers, according to Lakhoika. With a team of 20, mostly consisting of Belarusian expatriates, Vocal Image intends to expand its development team and introduce additional language options beyond English, including Spanish, German, French, Ukrainian, and Russian.

This recent funding comes shortly after Vocal Image was recognized by Hugging Face, Meta, and Scaleway as one of the top five winners in their European AI Startup Program amid increasing competition. For instance, the edtech company Headway recently introduced an AI-enhanced speech trainer for its social skills app, Skillsta. Nevertheless, Vocal Image stands to benefit from its GDPR-compliant AI capabilities.

Processing around 35,000 recordings daily, Vocal Image has gathered over 1 million real-voice samples. This dataset is further enriched through a community feature called Voice Rating, allowing users to evaluate whether others’ voices come across as “confident” or “childlike.”

Such a dataset is vital for applications like Vocal Image to enhance their efficacy and can also assist AI startups in refining their synthetic voice technology, offering further momentum for the startup beyond its B2C focus.