CIOTech Outlook Team | Monday, 14 July 2025, 06:31 IST
The acquisition of voice AI startup PlayAI has been finalized by Meta Platforms Inc.he parent company of Facebook, as part of its relentless AI expansion efforts. PlayAI specializes in high-fidelity voice cloning, real-time speech synthesis, as well as programmable multilingual voice agents. With this acquisition, Meta has acquired PlayAI’s voice technology and the entire PlayAI engineering team into Meta's AI group.
The PlayAI engineering team will report to Ohanhalkwyk, who was recently hired at Meta from Sesame AI. The integration of PlayAI is expected to enhance Meta's conversational AI capabilities across all of Meta's platforms, including AI Characters, and wearable devices such as Ray-Ban smart glasses and upcoming Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) headsets.
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While financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, sources have indicated that the acquisition will likely fall within the range of $300 - 500 million; Meta has made a bet that its investment will yield significant human-centric voice interaction technologies to incorporate into its product suite.
In addition to the technology, the acquisition represents a good fit for Meta's larger aspiration to become a market leader in multimodal artificial intelligence that combines voice, vision, and text modalities. PlayAI's platform enables nuanced, emotionally expressive speech responses with low latency; this will provide Meta with tant competitive advantages in augmenting user engagement across digital/physical experiences.
