Report: Meta in Talks to Acquire Voice AI Platform PlayAI

Meta is reportedly in talks to acquire voice artificial intelligence (AI) platform PlayAI.

The companies are in advanced talks on a deal in which Meta would acquire PlayAI’s technology and some of its employees, Bloomberg reported Thursday (June 26), citing unnamed sources.

The deal has not been finalized, and its provisions could change, according to the report.

Reached by PYMNTS, Meta declined to comment on the report.

PlayAI did not immediately respond to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

An acquisition of PlayAI could help Meta bring more voice features to its AI assistant and its smartglasses, the Bloomberg report said.

PlayAI said in a November blog post that it raised $21 million in seed and pre-seed funding to “craft the voice of intelligence and be the cornerstone of voice-first human-computer interaction.”

The company said in the post that it had released a text-to-speech model with voice cloning called Play 3.0 mini, a no-code voice agent platform, real-time application programming interfaces (APIs) for conversational voice agents and multi-turn speech model called PlayDialog.

In a November press release announcing the seed round, PlayAI Co-founder and CEO Mahmoud Felfel said: “Speech as an interface is exploding in popularity, and we knew it was a massive opportunity from the get-go. Building voice agents that can converse like humans and autonomously handle complex tasks is no easy feat, and I’m immensely proud of what our team has achieved.”

It was reported Tuesday (June 24) that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has approached several high-profile AI startups for potential acquisition.

While most of the AI startups said no to Zuckerberg, he succeeded with Scale AI. Meta is investing $14.3 billion for a 49% stake and hiring away its CEO, Alexandr Wang, who will lead Meta’s superintelligence efforts.

Zuckerberg is seeking to beef up its AI efforts after reportedly being frustrated by the pace of advancements of its flagship open-source large language model, Llama.

He has also been personally campaigning to hire new AI talent to bolster the company’s efforts. It was reported Thursday that Meta convinced three of OpenAI’s researchers to join the social media giant in pursuing its AI efforts.