Dialog and Rime Labs Launch Arcana, Sri Lanka’s First Enterprise-Ready Sinhala Text-to-Speech Model

Dialog Axiata PLC, Sri Lanka’s #1 connectivity provider, announced the launch of Arcana, Sri Lanka’s first enterprise-ready Sinhala text-to-speech (TTS) model developed in collaboration with Rime Labs Inc. Built specifically for the Sri Lankan market, the model is now live and ready for deployment as the most reliable and accurate Sinhala TTS model for local enterprises.

Rime Labs engineered the complete TTS model lifecycle, including data pipeline design, training data curation, model training, quality evaluation, and production deployment, while Dialog contributed domain knowledge, Sinhala language expertise, quality testing, and deployment context essential to localising the model for the Sri Lankan market. This collaboration combined Dialog's deep understanding of the Sri Lankan market with Rime's voice AI expertise, resulting in a model that meets the high standards of Sinhala speakers for pronunciation and prosody. The model goes beyond generic synthesis by offering operators advanced control through features like domain-specific terminology tuning and custom brand voices.

The model was benchmarked against global TTS providers before launch. Sinhala is spoken by approximately 16 million people and has been consistently underserved by mainstream voice AI platforms, which have historically concentrated on a small set of high-resource languages. Developers building consumer-facing applications no longer have to default to English or accept low-quality Sinhala synthesis. Dialog has a track record of deploying AI-powered services in Sri Lanka, including a trilingual AI platform and AI-driven agricultural advisory tools, and this model extends that capability to voice. Rime Labs' architecture supports both on-premise and cloud deployment, which matters in regulated industries and markets where data residency requirements are a real constraint.

Dr. Romesh Ranawana, Group Chief Analytics and AI Officer of Dialog Axiata PLC said, “Local-language AI capabilities are essential to making digital services more accessible and practical for Sri Lankan users. The Arcana Sinhala Text-to-Speech model enables organisations across sectors to integrate voice experiences into applications and services using natural Sinhala speech.”

"Getting a new language to production means solving hard problems at every layer: data, training, evaluation, and infrastructure," added Lily Clifford, CEO of Rime Labs. "Sinhala is a morphologically complex language that most voice AI companies haven't invested in seriously. Dialog gave us the context and partnership to build something that actually works for real speakers."

Rime Labs and Dialog aim to drive adoption of the model among enterprise customers and the broader developer ecosystem, supporting the growth of Sinhala voice AI technologies in Sri Lanka.