Patientdesk.ai raised $1 million in a pre-seed round led by Y Combinator. The company has made its two Turkish-focused models available: Alania converts text to speech, while Duyu converts speech to text; the models can be used with a single account and API key and are offered free of charge for one month from the registration date. The company notes that predominantly English training data can cause problems with Turkish’s agglutinative structure, proper names, low-quality phone audio, email addresses, and phone numbers; it developed the models using the call assistant experience of US clinics. Duyu outperformed Whisper large-v3, with an error rate of 4.71% on FLEURS compared with 5.04%; in the company’s test, the rate was measured at 9.87%, while ElevenLabs Scribe v2 scored 10.4%. Duyu can transcribe live conversations in real time. Alania generates audio as a stream and offers a single voice, along with appointment, question, and calming tones. Both models are compatible with the OpenAI API format. The models can be tested in a browser, and developers can create an API key. The experimental Antalia-1 was released as open source along with a dataset of approximately 5 hours, its code, weights, and a technical report.
Why it matters
In Turkish speech technologies, the issue is not only whether the model understands speech, but also whether it can maintain its accuracy under usage conditions such as agglutinative structures, proper names, and low-quality phone recordings; for this reason, the shared tests are particularly significant for teams developing call center and clinical communications solutions. A single account, an API key, and OpenAI API compatibility offer an integration framework that could make it easier to adapt the models to existing software. Browser-based testing and one month of free use allow developers to evaluate performance in their own scenarios without incurring costs. By contrast, how the results will change under real-world usage conditions outside the company’s tests, and who will develop the open-source Antalia-1 and for what purposes, remain among the open questions.
Background
Turkish is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we have published 3 news articles mentioning the name in the last 90 days; the most recent is dated September 13, 2026.