Meta, formerly Facebook, has acquired PlayAI, an Egyptian voice AI startup, as part of its strategy to compete with Google and OpenAI in the generative AI race.
Founded by Hammad Syed and Mahmoud Felfel, who had previously worked together on the classifieds website Dubizzle in Dubai, PlayAI has developed its flagship product, Play Dialog, which it refers to as the “voice of intelligence.”
After being trained on hundreds of millions of conversations, a multi-turn speech model is highly skilled at comprehending context and reacting with complex emotions. Additionally, it has released a no-code voice agent platform, real-time APIs, and Play 3.0 mini, a quick, lightweight, multilingual real-time text-to-speech model.
With support from Kindred Ventures, 500 Global, Y Combinator, Race Capital, Soma Capital, and Pioneer Fund, among others, PlayAI raised US$21 million in seed funding last year. The company was later acquired by Meta, which claims that PlayAI’s voice creation platform is in line with its own roadmap for wearables, AI characters, Meta AI, and audio content creation.
As part of Meta’s larger plan to take on OpenAI and Google in the generative AI race, the whole PlayAI team will join Meta and report directly to the company’s AI leadership.
