Meta Acquires Voice AI Startup Play AI Amid Major Push into Audio and Superintelligence

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has acquired Play AI, a startup known for its work in creating human-like, AI-generated voices. The acquisition aims to bolster Meta’s capabilities in voice-driven products, particularly in areas like Meta AI, AI Characters, wearables, and audio content creation. Play AI’s full team will officially join Meta next week, as confirmed by a company spokesperson.

An internal memo seen by Bloomberg reveals that Meta sees strong alignment between Play AI’s voice synthesis platform and Meta’s roadmap across various audio and AI initiatives. Though financial details of the acquisition remain undisclosed, the move represents a continuation of Meta’s growing interest in multimodal AI experiences, especially in content and character generation.

This acquisition follows Meta’s recent $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, in which it acquired a 49% stake. Alexandr Wang, Scale AI’s co-founder and CEO, has since joined Meta as Chief AI Officer and now leads the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs. This new division will centralize and accelerate Meta’s AI efforts company-wide.

Meta has also ramped up its hiring of top AI talent, recently bringing in Jack Rae from Google DeepMind and reportedly offering OpenAI employees up to $100 million to switch teams. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged Meta’s offers but questioned whether Meta’s corporate culture aligns with the mission-driven ethos needed for meaningful AI innovation, noting none of OpenAI’s key staff have accepted the offers.

Traditionally reliant on in-house research and open-source projects such as its Llama large language model, Meta has pivoted toward a more aggressive AI investment strategy. In January 2025, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to make AI Meta’s top priority, committing up to $65 billion in infrastructure spending. Meta is also pursuing $29 billion in additional funding to support this AI expansion, including building next-gen data centers in the U.S.

Source: Nairametrics