What is an AI Voice Assistant - Top 5 Picks in 2025
Struggling with robotic-sounding phone menus and slow customer support?
Luckily, AI Voice Assistants can help with that!
Voice assistants give your business a friendly, intelligent, and human-like voice that can understand and help customers 24/7, just like a real person.
Here’s what you should know about AI Voice Assistants and our top picks to help you make your business sound much, much smarter.
What is an AI Voice Assistant
An AI Voice Assistant is a program that uses artificial intelligence to talk with people in a natural, human-like way.
AI voice assistants work as a central brain for your company's communications, where a customer's spoken words are understood, their intent is figured out, and a helpful action is taken.
The goal of these AI voice assistants is to solve problems quickly and give callers a smooth, positive experience without ever having to wait on hold. It's the difference between a system that just plays recorded messages and one that has a real conversation.
How AI Voice Assistants Work
The real breakthrough with AI voice assistants is that they permit technology and computers to have a conversation. The whole process happens in a few simple steps, all in a fraction of a second.
- Listening and Converting to Text: First, the system "listens" to what the person is saying. A technology called Automatic Speech Recognition, or ASR, captures the spoken words. The words are then converted into written text that a computer can read. This step is like having a super-fast transcriptionist.
- Understanding the Meaning: Once the words are in text form, the AI's "brain" kicks in. Using Natural Language Understanding, or NLU, the system figures out the meaning and intent behind the words. The system does not just hear the literal words about a package's location. The system understands that the customer wants their order status.
- Finding the Answer: After understanding the request, the assistant decides what to do. This "brain" part, called dialogue management, might need to look up information from other systems. These could be your customer database, ordering system, or appointment calendar. The AI voice assistant finds the right answer or decides on the next logical question to ask.
- Forming a Response: Now that the system has the answer, the AI needs to figure out how to say it back in a natural, human way. The AI voice assistant uses Natural Language Generation, or NLG, to form a sentence that is helpful and easy to understand.
- Speaking the Words: Finally, the AI voice assistant uses an advanced Text to Speech, or TTS, engine to convert the written response back into spoken words. The best systems use what are called neural voices. These voices are trained on real human speech to sound incredibly lifelike, complete with natural tones and inflections.
Benefits of AI Voice Assistants
Using these smart AI voice assistants is more than just a neat trick. This is a powerful way to improve your business and make customers happier. Here are some of the biggest benefits:
- Always On 24/7 Customer Service: An AI voice assistant never sleeps, takes a vacation, or calls in sick. The assistant is ready to help your customers around the clock, whether it’s a weekend, a holiday, or the middle of the night. This means no more missed calls or making customers wait for business hours.
- Dramatically Lower Wait Times: The number one frustration for callers is being put on hold. An AI assistant can handle hundreds or even thousands of calls at the same time. This action effectively gets rid of hold times. Every customer gets an instant response.
- Huge Cost Savings: Hiring, training, and paying a large team of human agents to be available 24/7 is incredibly expensive. An AI voice assistant can handle the vast majority of common, repetitive questions for a fraction of the cost. This can save you a massive amount on operational expenses.
- Free Up Your Human Team for High Value Work: When the AI handles all the simple, repetitive inquiries, such as questions about business hours or requests for a password reset, your human agents are freed up. They can then direct their attention to the complex, sensitive, and high value problems that truly require a human touch.
- Consistent and Error Free Information: Humans can have bad days, forget things, or make mistakes. An AI voice assistant will always present the correct, approved information every single time. This makes sure every customer receives the same high standard of service consistently.
Top 5 Best AI Voice Assistants
With so many options out there, choosing the right one can be tough. We have reviewed the market to find the best AI voice assistants available in 2025 that can deliver truly human-like conversations.
1. Thunai
Thunai stands out as the top AI voice assistant specifically for businesses that want a fully functional AI agent, not just a voice. Thunai is less of a tool and more of a ready-to-deploy AI employee. Its biggest strength is its ability to handle entire, complex conversations and complete tasks autonomously. This makes it perfect for customer support and sales.
The platform is built to be a true agent. You can give it goals, like booking appointments or qualifying sales leads, and it handles the entire process.
Key Features:
- The system understands different languages and accents and can be given a unique personality.
- The platform also connects directly with your business software, such as your CRM or calendar.
- This makes it incredibly powerful for businesses that want to automate full workflows, not just generate voice responses. The system even includes advanced functions like AI-powered screen sharing to guide customers visually in real time.
2. ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs has become famous for one thing: creating the most realistic and emotionally expressive AI voices on the market.
If your top priority is a voice that is indistinguishable from a human, ElevenLabs is a leader.
This is a top AI voice assistant for creators, developers, and businesses who need best-in-class voice generation for things like audiobooks, video game characters, or content creation.
Key Features:
- Their platform allows for incredibly detailed voice cloning.
- This lets you create a digital replica of a specific voice from just a few minutes of audio. You can also design entirely new, unique voices and control their emotional delivery with amazing precision, from happy and excited to sad or angry.
- While this is primarily a voice generation tool, its API can be connected to larger voice assistant systems.
3. PlayHT
PlayHT has a powerful and versatile platform that bridges the gap between high-quality voice generation and creating conversational AI.
The service has a massive library of realistic stock voices and also excels at voice cloning. This makes it a strong competitor to ElevenLabs. The service is trusted by major companies for its reliability and the quality of its audio output.
PlayHT is a top AI voice assistant for scalability, and its functions are geared towards business use cases. The company has different tiers and models.
Key Features:
- These include faster models for real-time conversations and higher fidelity models for media production.
- Their API is well documented, making it a favorite among developers who want to build custom voice applications.
- These applications could be anything from podcasts and video narration to interactive voice response systems for customer service.
4. ResembleAI
ResembleAI is a platform that goes beyond just text-to-speech. The company has a full suite of tools for creating and managing AI voices for various applications, with a strong commitment to ethical use and brand identity.
Their AI voice assistant is great for businesses that want to create a unique, proprietary voice that becomes part of their brand.
Key Features:
- One of its standout functions is called Resemble Fill. This function lets you edit recorded audio by simply typing new words, a process called speech-to-speech.
- This is incredibly useful for fixing errors in recordings without having to re-record everything.
- The company also has tools for adding real-time emotion to voices and localizing content by translating and dubbing a voice into different languages while preserving its original character. This makes it ideal for entertainment, advertising, and corporate training.
5. Microsoft Azure Neural TTS
Coming from a tech giant like Microsoft, Azure's Neural Text to Speech service is built for enterprise-grade reliability, security, and scale. The service is part of the broader Azure AI Services ecosystem. This means it connects smoothly with a huge range of other powerful AI tools.
If your company is already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, this is a natural and powerful AI voice assistant to work with. Azure's strength is its durability and the sheer breadth of its products.
Key Features:
- The service has a vast library of high-quality, natural-sounding neural voices across hundreds of languages and locales.
- The service also allows for the creation of custom-branded voices.
- While the system may require more technical know-how to set up compared to some startups, this is an incredibly powerful and secure option for large-scale enterprise applications, from call centers to voice-ready apps and services.
How to Choose the Right AI Voice Assistant
Selecting the right AI voice assistant depends entirely on what you need it to do. Here’s a simple guide to help you choose the perfect fit for your business.
- First, Define Your Goal: Before you look at any software, ask yourself what problem you are trying to solve. Do you need a voice for your videos for content creation? Or do you need an AI that can handle customer calls from start to finish, like a full agent? Your goal decides everything.
- Full Agent vs. Voice Tool: This is the biggest decision. If you need to automate entire conversations and tasks like booking appointments or qualifying leads, you need a full AI voice assistant like the ones offered by Thunai. If you just need to generate high-quality voice audio from a script, you need a voice tool like ElevenLabs or PlayHT.
- Listen to the Voice Quality: The whole point is to sound human. Listen to samples from each company. Does the voice sound natural? Does the voice have the right tone for your brand? Some platforms are better at creating warm, friendly voices, while others excel at professional, authoritative ones.
- Check for Connections: A voice assistant is useless if it can’t connect to your other business software. Make sure the platform you choose can easily connect to your CRM, calendar, or whatever other tools you use to run your business.
- Consider Ease of Use: How much technical skill do you have on your team? Some platforms are simple, no code solutions that anyone can set up in minutes. Others are powerful APIs that require a developer to get them working. Choose one that matches your team’s capabilities.
Comparison Table with Use Cases, Pricing
To make it even easier, here’s a breakdown of our top AI voice assistants. Note that pricing is subject to change and often has different tiers, so this is a general guide.
Scale Your Business Today with Thunai
While many AI voice assistants can give you a great voice, Thunai gives you a complete AI employee. This AI voice assistant is built from the ground up to do the job, not just say the words.
Thunai’s voice agents can handle entire customer conversations 24/7, book appointments, qualify sales leads, and resolve issues in over 50 languages. Get instant, amazing support for your customers while freeing up your team to work on growth.
Not to mention, its unique screenshare function allows the AI agent to visually guide your customers step by step through any issue.
Want to see how Thunai can change your customer experience? Why not try Thunai out for free and build your first AI agent in minutes!
