Tech behemoth Meta announced on Sunday that it has acquired artificial intelligence voice startup Play AI, confirming prior reports.
A Meta spokesperson told Bloomberg that an internal memo stated that the “entire Play AI team” will be joining the company next week. This memo also stated that Play AI’s “work in creating natural voices, along with a platform for easy voice creation, is a great match for our work and road map, across AI Characters, Meta AI, Wearables and audio content creation.”
Play AI says its service allows anyone to clone various voice types for use in AI-driven applications like customer service. The startup, which was founded in 2019, also claims to be able to generate speech with “hyper-realism across any language, accent and dialect.”
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The startup has raised $23.5 million in total, and its investors include 500 Startups, Kindred Ventures, Race Capital, 500 Global and Soma Capital, according to Crunchbase.
Earlier this year, Play AI had announced it would be partnering with Groq to deliver Dialog, a market-leading voice AI model that combines PlayAI’s advanced text-to-speech (TTS) technology with Groq LPU-based AI inference infrastructure. It has also announced a strategic partnership with Reality Defender to combat AI voice deepfakes.
The integration of Play AI into Meta is expected to strengthen the tech giant’s capabilities in voice technology, as well as AI-driven solutions. This comes at a time when Meta is on an acquisition and hiring spree in an effort to strengthen its AI-related developments.
The company had recruited Daniel Gross, the CEO of OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI), following a failed attempt to acquire the same company. Gross also runs a venture capital firm with GitHub CEO Nat Friedman — who’s also been hired by Meta — called NFDG. Gross’ recruitment comes shortly after the recruitment of Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, which came with Meta investing $14.3 million into the company as part of the deal. This deal also gives Meta a 49% stake in the startup.
Meta also recently invested $3.5 billion into eyewear company EssilorLuxottica in order to further its efforts developing AI-powered wearable technology. The tech giant bought a minority stake worth around $3.51 billion, and is considering further investments that could expand its stake to 5%.
Meta has been accused of “poaching” high level employees from other companies like OpenAI, offering as much as $100 million in bonuses to do so. The company has recruited top OpenAI researchers Trapit Bansal, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, as well as Apple’s Ruoming Pang. Most of these hires are expected to work at Meta’s superintelligence lab.