What Supertone Actually Makes

Supertone is an AI voice and audio technology company — not a music platform. It builds tools that create, change, and clean up voices. Founded in Seoul in 2020, it is now a HYBE subsidiary.

The clearest way to understand it is one product at a time. The names are short and easy to confuse, but they do completely different jobs.

1. The four products

Product	One line	What it does
Play	AI voice generation (TTS)	Type text, get speech. Per the official site, usable without sign-up
Shift	Real-time voice changer	Instantly transforms your voice. macOS and Windows. 100+ voices free every month
Clear	De-noise / de-reverb plugin	Cleans up recorded voice. Three knobs: Voice, Ambience, Reverb
Air	Dialogue matching plugin	Matches reverb and EQ so ADR sits naturally in the mix

A Supertone API is offered separately for developers.

Play vs. Shift: Play creates a voice that doesn't exist (text → speech). Shift changes a voice that does (your voice → another, in real time).

Clear vs. Air: Clear removes (makes audio clean). Air matches (makes audio belong). If re-recorded dialogue sounds like it's floating on top of the scene, Air is the tool aimed at exactly that.

2. Sona Speech 2

Supertone's most advanced TTS model. Two verified points from the official blog:

Supports 23 languages (en, ko, ja, bg, cs, da, el, es, et, fi, hu, it, nl, pl, pt, ro, ar, de, fr, hi, id, ru, vi)
From a single voice-cloning sample, it can speak across languages while preserving the original timbre

The company positions it for work where quality matters more than latency — narration, audiobooks, character dialogue, marketing audio. Which implies: for genuinely real-time use, look elsewhere in the lineup.

3. Supertonic — open-source, on-device TTS

Less widely known: Supertone publishes Supertonic, a lightweight multilingual TTS that runs natively on-device via ONNX, open source. Worth a look when privacy or offline operation matters.

4. Company background (corrected)

Founded 2020, Seoul.
2021 — HYBE takes an 18.2% stake.
January 2023 — HYBE invests roughly 45 billion KRW to take a 56.1% stake, becoming the largest shareholder.

Many articles online scramble these dates and figures. The earlier version of this post did too.

5. Who it's for

Short-form / YouTube / podcast creators → Play
Gaming and streaming → Shift
Video and film post-production → Clear (cleanup) + Air (dialogue matching)
Developers → Supertone API, or open-source Supertonic for on-device

What Supertone Actually Makes