IBM is looking to change that by making Deepgram its first-ever voice partner, embedding the startup’s high-speed speech-to-text (STT) and text-to-speech (TTS) tech directly into watsonx Orchestrate.

This isn’t just a minor plugin; it’s a foundational upgrade for IBM’s generative AI solution. By integrating Deepgram, IBM is giving its enterprise clients the ability to build voice agents that actually understand natural human speech, accents, background noise, and all.

The Natural Speech Problem

Most legacy speech-to-text systems crumble when faced with a busy hospital ward, a noisy call center, or a regional accent. Deepgram’s play is its ability to handle real-world audio conditions across a massive range of languages, including dozens of Arabic and Indian dialects.

What this means for the suit-and-tie crowd:

• Low Latency: Voice agents that respond in real-time, not after a five-second thinking
• Custom Tuning: Enterprises can train the AI to understand industry-specific jargon in healthcare or finance.
• Sovereign Dialects: Support for regional accents that global tech giants often ignore.

A First for Big Blue

Being IBM’s first voice partner is a massive street cred boost for Deepgram. For IBM, it’s a move toward an open ecosystem strategy, acknowledging that while they built the brain (watsonx), they’re happy to let a specialist build the ears and the mouth.

“Voice is rapidly becoming the default interface between humans and technology,” said Scott Stephenson, CEO and Co-Founder of Deepgram. “IBM clients can now build voice agents on a real-time foundation that has been refined over a decade.”

Techeconomy’s take is that for years, Voice AI was synonymous with Siri or Alexa, fun for setting timers, but too unreliable for serious business workflows. This partnership signals that the enterprise voice interface has finally grown up.

By embedding Deepgram into the watsonx Orchestrate Agent Builder, IBM is telling its clients: Don’t just type to your AI; talk to it.

In sectors like healthcare, where hands-free data entry can save lives, and finance, where call analysis is a goldmine, this integration is less of a luxury and more of a requirement for the 2026 AI stack.

For Deepgram, hitching a ride on IBM’s enterprise reach is a masterstroke in distribution. For IBM, it’s a necessary step to ensure watsonx doesn’t just think well, but communicates better.

This makes Deepgram IBM’s first voice partner, providing real-time transcription and voice features for enterprise clients.

The integration is designed to improve how companies handle complex audio environments, including background noise, accents, and natural conversation.

It also supports a wide range of languages and regional dialects, including multiple Arabic and Indian variants. Users will gain access to real-time captioning, natural-sounding voices, and options for custom tuning.

These tools can be applied across sectors such as healthcare and finance, supporting automated customer care, call analysis, and voice-driven data entry.

Scott Stephenson, Deepgram CEO and co-founder, said, “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. 

“By embedding Deepgram inside watsonx Orchestrate Agent Builder, IBM clients can build voice agents and voice-enabled workflows on top of a real-time foundation that has been developed and refined over more than a decade.”

Nick Holda, vice president of AI Technology Partnerships at IBM, added, “Our watsonx Orchestrate integration powered by Deepgram APIs introduces new speech recognition and transcription capabilities to IBM clients, refining and modernizing their operations. 

“This collaboration aims to help enterprise organizations accelerate their AI initiatives and reinforces IBM’s open ecosystem, bringing choice and cutting-edge voice technology to partners and customers.”

The partnership is expected to strengthen IBM’s ability to provide flexible voice solutions to enterprise clients while expanding Deepgram’s reach to new customers through a trusted platform.

Deepgram provides real-time speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and full speech-to-speech features through cloud or on-premises APIs.

It has processed over 50,000 years of audio and transcribed more than one trillion words. IBM, on the other hand, provides hybrid cloud, AI, and consulting solutions to clients in over 175 countries.

The round was led by AVP, an independent global investment platform dedicated to high-growth technology companies across Europe and North America.

All major existing investors joined the round, including Alkeon, In-Q-Tel, Madrona, Tiger, Wing, Y Combinator, and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock. Several new investors, including Alumni Ventures and Princeville Capital, invested in the round, in addition to industry leaders such as Twilio, ServiceNow Ventures, SAP, and Citi Ventures.

University of Michigan and Columbia University also invested, joining other existing academic investors such as Stanford University.

With this investment, Deepgram is ideally positioned to deliver the real-time frontier Voice AI models and platform required to reliably power billions of live conversations with the naturalness, latency, and accuracy of human voice. AVP was selected as lead investor for its deep expertise scaling category-defining companies globally and its ability to support Deepgram’s international expansion, including Europe and other key markets.

“Much like Stripe delivered the API platform underpinning the payments economy, we believe Deepgram is poised to deliver the API platform underpinning the emerging trillion-dollar B2B Voice AI economy,” said Elizabeth de Saint-Aignan, General Partner at AVP. “Deepgram’s success in building real-time, reliable, and massively scalable Voice AI infrastructure, combined with the rapid shift toward voice-first B2B experiences, positions the company to become one of the foundational AI companies of this decade.”

“As we rapidly approach a world where billions of simultaneous conversations are powered by Voice AI, enterprises and developers need real-time, reliable infrastructure capable of fully duplex, contextual conversations at scale – this is Deepgram,” said Scott Stephenson, CEO and Co-Founder of Deepgram. “From pioneering end-to-end deep learning for voice, to earning multiple patents for our research, to our commitment to pass the Audio Turing Test at scale in 2026, we’ve consistently executed on a single vision: powering a future centered on the original human interface – voice.”

“We are pleased to welcome AVP and our new strategic investors,” continued Stephenson. “Together with our existing investors, their conviction reflects the emergence of the Voice AI economy, and Deepgram’s role in powering it.”

Powered by Deepgram

Today, more than 1,300 organizations build Voice AI functionality powered by Deepgram APIs. Deepgram APIs are a foundational infrastructure layer of a global set of offerings delivering real-time, accurate, and reliable speech understanding, speech generation, analytics, orchestration, and fully autonomous voice agents.

“Voice is a critical, strategic, and data-rich customer engagement channel,” said Andy O’Dower, vice president of Product Management for Voice and Video at Twilio. “Twilio’s flexible orchestration capabilities and global communications infrastructure, combined with speech recognition powered by Deepgram APIs, deliver seamless, low-latency, and human-like AI agent experiences that are powering today’s Voice AI renaissance.”

The designation comes after a demanding evaluation that required Deepgram to demonstrate technical strength, verified customer success, and real-world deployments. This acknowledgement reveals that its voice technologies are powerful, secure and production-ready.

Abe Pursell, vice president of Business Development and Partnerships at Deepgram, explained the importance of the achievement. “Generative AI is one of the most transformative technologies of our time — but in order for enterprises to adopt it with confidence, they need proof it works at scale and integrates seamlessly into their existing stack. This recognition from AWS gives our customers exactly that peace of mind. It shows Deepgram’s voice AI solutions have already been tested, vetted, and proven in the real world.”

For customers, the benefit isn’t limited to trust. The partnership brings closer alignment with AWS services such as Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Connect, and Amazon SageMaker. It also enables enterprises to take advantage of AWS Marketplace access, Private Pricing Agreements (PPAs), and AWS credits, factors that can reduce costs and boost deployment.

According to Pursell, “For customers, collaborating with an AWS Generative AI Competency provider like Deepgram translates into faster time-to-value, reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), and peace of mind that their investment is future-proofed within the AWS GenAI ecosystem.”

The AWS Competency Programme is designed to help organisations identify partners with proven expertise in using AWS tools and infrastructure to build and integrate generative AI solutions. 

For Deepgram, it represents an endorsement of years spent refining voice-native models capable of handling speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and speech-to-speech tasks with speed and accuracy.

With more than 200,000 developers building on its platform, and over a trillion words already transcribed, the company has built solutions highly essential in the voice AI market. Including startups and global enterprises, Deepgram’s services now stand on even stronger ground within AWS’s growing generative AI space.

The partnership will expand Deepgram’s integrations with AWS, strengthen co-selling initiatives, and give enterprises new tools to build accurate, scalable, and compliant voice applications. 

Innovative startups and Fortune 100 enterprises alike are already transforming customer experiences using Deepgram and AWS. One Fortune 20 healthcare company uses Deepgram’s speech models on secure, scalable AWS infrastructure to modernize its contact center operations and deliver faster, more personalized customer support.

As a Generative AI Competency Partner and long-standing AWS Partner Network (APN) member, Deepgram offers a full-featured voice AI platform that includes speech-to-text(STT), text-to-speech (TTS), and speech-to-speech (STS) capabilities.

Additionally, Deepgram’s Dedicated deployment and EU endpoints run entirely on AWS infrastructure, enabling enterprise customers to meet global requirements for data residency, security, and compliance.

Deepgram’s infrastructure is deeply integrated with AWS, enabling customers to deploy its platform on Amazon EKS for scalable container orchestration, store data securely with Amazon S3, and manage containers using Amazon ECR.

Customers can also use Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda to securely orchestrate interactions between Deepgram’s voice AI APIs and other services, including Amazon Bedrock hosted models and enterprise systems.

Whether deployed in a customer-owned VPC or as a fully managed SaaS environment, Deepgram offers the flexibility required to maintain compliance, ensure data control, and operate efficiently at scale. Looking ahead, Deepgram plans to expand availability through AWS services like Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock to further streamline AI model deployment and orchestration.

“By deepening our collaboration with AWS, we’re enabling enterprises to move faster and with greater confidence as they build and modernize their voice applications,” said Scott Stephenson, CEO and co-founder of Deepgram.

“Whether it’s real-time transcription in financial services or voice AI agents in customer support, Deepgram infrastructure gives developers the tools to build accurate, scalable voice experiences from the ground up.” 

Deepgram’s speech-to-text API can also be integrated into Amazon Connect, enabling best-in-class STT speed and accuracy for real-time transcription and voice automation within contact center environments. This helps enterprises improve agent productivity, automate call summaries, and enhance customer experiences.

“Enterprise customers have been clear about their need for voice AI that integrates seamlessly with their existing technology investments,” said Jon Jones, vice president of AWS Startups and Venture Capital.

“Our deepened collaboration with Deepgram means customers can deploy voice capabilities within their AWS environments. This integration simplifies procurement, deployment, and scaling, allowing enterprises to focus on creating differentiated experiences rather than managing complex infrastructure.”

As part of the SCA, Deepgram will invest in building GenAI-enabled capabilities on AWS, deliver new case studies and proof-of-concepts for enterprise customers, and continue optimizing its models and services for the AWS ecosystem. 

Deepgram’s availability in AWS Marketplace also simplifies procurement for engineering and infrastructure teams by enabling usage-based pricing, unified billing, and rapid deployment within existing AWS environments.

“By leveraging Deepgram in AWS Marketplace, we avoided the need for direct licensing and self-provisioning, which helped us sidestep operational inefficiencies,” said Robby Grossman, VP of Engineering at Wistia.

“It allowed us to quickly implement a top-tier speech recognition solution with superior performance and usage-based pricing, making it easy to scale as needed while maintaining cost efficiency.”