
Meta just acquired PlayAI, a voice AI startup that makes synthetic voices sound like real people. The entire team starts at Meta next week.
Key Points
- PlayAI builds text-to-speech models and voice agents for businesses.
- Founded in 2024, it raised $21 million in seed funding from Y Combinator and others.
- Financial terms weren't shared.
Founded by Mahmoud Felfel and Hammad Syed, PlayAI started as a Chrome plugin that read articles aloud before evolving into a comprehensive voice AI platform. The company's Play 3.0 mini model supports 30+ languages and allows rapid creation of voice agents for customer support, appointment scheduling, and sales.
This fits right into Meta's big AI push this year. They've poured money into chips, data centers, and top talent. Mark Zuckerberg shook up the AI team, naming Alexandr Wang from Scale AI to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs.
Meta's latest AI model, Llama 4, released in April 2025, was widely considered a flop due to a rushed release, lack of transparency, and indications Meta was falling behind rivals like China's DeepSeek. The company has been hemorrhaging top AI talent, with 11 of the original 14 Llama authors leaving to join competitors.
The PlayAI team will work under Johan Schalkwyk, a strategic hire who previously led voice efforts at Sesame AI. Schalkwyk joined Meta's Superintelligence Lab to lead voice efforts and previously worked as a Google Fellow on bringing language technologies to 1,000 languages.
Voice technology has become increasingly important for Meta's products. The company's Ray-Ban smart glasses have tripled in sales, and voice interfaces are crucial for VR headsets and AI assistants. PlayAI's voice cloning and synthesis capabilities will enhance Meta's AI Characters, wearables, and audio content creation tools.
The acquisition follows Meta's established playbook of buying smaller AI companies primarily for talent rather than just technology. Similar "acquihire" deals have been used by Microsoft with Inflection, Amazon with Adept AI, and Google with Character AI, allowing companies to circumvent antitrust scrutiny while securing specialized AI expertise.
While financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed.