Meta has reportedly acquired voice technology/artificial intelligence (AI) startup PlayAI.
The “entire PlayAI team” is due to join Meta this week, Bloomberg News reported late Friday (July 11), citing an internal memo. The company confirmed the acquisition but declined to comment further, the report added.
These new employees will report to Johan Schalkwyk, who joined Meta recently from another voice AI startup, Sesame AI, Bloomberg reported. The news follows an earlier report from the news outlet that the companies were in talks about an acquisition.
PlayAI’s “work in creating natural voices, along with a platform for easy voice creation, is a great match for our work and road map, across AI Characters, Meta AI, Wearables and audio content creation,” the memo read.
As Bloomberg noted, Meta has made AI its chief priority, spending significantly on infrastructure such as data centers, while also recruiting talent such as Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, who is running the company’s new AI group, Meta Superintelligence Labs.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been looking to bolster the company’s AI efforts after reportedly being frustrated by the pace of development on Llama, the tech giant’s flagship open-source large language model.
In addition to recruiting Wang, the CEO has been personally campaigning to hire new AI talent. The past few weeks have brought reports that Meta had hired AI experts from rival tech companies such as OpenAI and Apple.
The company’s acquisition of PlayAI is happening at a time when voice-based AI agents are advancing to the point that they are now outperforming call centers and beginning to replace human labor in industries from healthcare to retail, PYMNTS wrote last month, citing a report from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
“Voice is one of the most powerful unlocks for AI application companies,” Olivia Moore, a partner at the firm, wrote in a 2025 AI Voice Agent Update blog post. “It is the most frequent and information-dense form of communication, made programmable for the first time due to AI.”
By making voice programmable, AI can interpret and act on voiced queries with more accuracy and reliability. Voice is naturally unstructured and messy, as people can interrupt each other, switch topics, or use slang.
Moore said voice AI allows businesses to respond to customers around the clock instead of having to wait until their office is staffed. For consumers, “We believe voice will be the first — and perhaps primary — way people interact with AI.”
Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has shown that 17.9% of consumers on average use voice technology to shop, with 30.4% of Gen Z consumers shopping by voice each week.
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/
