Meta acquires voice AI startup PlayAI to expand conversational audio technology

Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) has confirmed that it has completed the acquisition of voice artificial intelligence startup PlayAI, further increasing its investment in audio technology and conversational AI research and development. The specific amount of the acquisition has not been disclosed publicly. The entire PlayAI team will officially join Meta next week and report to Johan Schalkwyk, Meta's vice president and head of voice AI.

PlayAI is an artificial intelligence company focusing on speech generation, speech recognition and real-time dialogue systems. Its technology is widely used in voice assistants, podcast generation, virtual character voice drive and other fields. Meta's acquisition aims to integrate PlayAI's proprietary technology with its existing AI characters, speech synthesis tools and content creation platforms to promote Meta's capabilities in multimodal AI and voice interaction interfaces.

A Meta spokesperson said: "We are moving towards a new era of interaction centered on voice and natural language, and the addition of PlayAI will help us build more natural, real-time and immersive AI experiences, whether in Messenger, WhatsApp, Reels or the future metaverse."

The transaction is also seen by the industry as Meta's direct response to competing products such as OpenAI's Whisper, Google's Gemini Voice and xAI's Grok voice capabilities. PlayAI's professional team has a leading advantage in low-latency voice reasoning, multi-language processing and personalized voice models, and is expected to be deeply integrated with Meta's Llama model and AI character system to build a more realistic and emotional virtual voice character.

This acquisition will not only enhance Meta's ability to build an AI content ecosystem, but may also become a key technical support for Meta to deploy voice assistants in Quest, Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and future XR hardware.