Photo Credit: PlayAI
PlayAI, a Palto Alt-based artificial intelligence startup has quickly moved from a $21 million seed round to being acquired by Meta in less than a year.
PlayAI specializes in generative voice AI, enabling the creation of natural, human-sounding speech for applications ranging from customer support to content creation. The company’s technology leverage large language models trained on hundreds of millions of real-world conversations, allowing for nuanced control over prosody, intonation, emotion, and pacing.
The $21 million seed round was announced in late 2024 and was led by Kindred Ventures and 500 Global. Race Capital, Y Combinator, Soma Capital, and others participated in the funding raise. Steve Jang of Kindred Ventures joined as a board observer. After that funding raise, PlayAI released its flagship products including the PlayDialog multi-turn text-to-speech model and Play 3.0 Mini. It supports over 30 languages and offers low-latency, highly accurate voice cloning.
Now today, Meta has confirmed its acquisition of PlayAI. According to an internal memo reported by Bloomberg, the entire PlayAI will be joining Meta. The memo states, “PlayAI’s work in creating natural voices, along with a platform for easy voice creation, is a great match for our work and roadmap across AI characters, Meta AI, wearables, and audio content creation. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Meta has been investing heavily in AI, recently recruiting from OpenAI and bringing on Scale AI’s CEO Alexandr Wang to lead a new group focused on superintelligence. The acquisition of PlayAI is a strategic move to bolster Meta’s capabilities in AI-generated voices, which is expected to play a key role for the company in future products.
PlayAI has addressed concerns about misuse and deepfakes by implementing mechanisms to identify synthesized voices and a process for handling ethical violations. It’s unclear how those mechanisms work, but state-level legislation such as Tennessee’s ELVIS Act explicitly forbid using tools like this one to clone an artists’ voice.
Content shared from www.digitalmusicnews.com.