Meta Reportedly Planning to Acquire Startup PlayAI and Some of Its Employees

Meta is reportedly planning to acquire the Palo Alto, California-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup PlayAI. As per the report, the acquisition is aimed at bolstering its AI division to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Google. The Menlo Park-based social media giant has been aggressively pushing out new AI models and AI features for its platforms. The reported acquisition plans could help the company gain more employees skilled in AI, as well as the startup’s in-house technology stack.

According to a Bloomberg report, the tech giant is considering purchasing PlayAI. The AI startup was founded in 2019 by Hammad Syed and Mahmoud Felfel. It specialises in building real-time conversational agents, voice interfaces, and in-house AI voice models. Citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, the report claimed that the move to acquire the startup comes from Meta’s desire to hire top talent in the AI space.

The acquisition deal, which is yet to be finalised, reportedly also includes a provision to hire some of the startup’s employees. While the acquisition is expected to be completed soon, terms can still change, claimed the report. Notably, the financial terms of the deal are currently not known.

Meta appears to be actively looking for AI startups to acquire. Several reports earlier this month claimed that Mark Zuckerberg’s team held meetings with Perplexity to discuss a possible acquisition. The company has reportedly also made attempts to acquire Runway AI, a startup focused on developing AI models for video generation.

Apart from adding more AI talent to its team, the acquisition of PlayAI can also help Meta in other ways. The social media giant recently added a two-way voice conversation feature to its chatbot, however, in terms of end product, it is just a low-latency text-to-speech (TTS) tool. Compared to competitors such as ChatGPT or Gemini, this is one area where Meta AI is significantly behind.

However, this can change with the acquisition of PlayAI, which specialises in building AI voice generation models and voice interfaces. With this capability, the social media giant can scale up its own AI infrastructure and provide a voice experience that sounds more expressive and human-like.