Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has acquired the artificial intelligence (AI) voice startup "WaveForms," as reported by the information technology (IT) media outlet The Information on the 8th (local time). The scale of the acquisition was not disclosed.
Meta recently established the "Superintelligence Lab" with the goal of developing AI that surpasses human intelligence, and this acquisition is seen as part of strengthening the lab's capabilities. This is the second major acquisition in the AI audio field, following the acquisition of the voice AI startup PlayAI last month.
Founded just 8 months ago, WaveForms secured $40 million in investments from the prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. According to the market research firm PitchBook, WaveForms was valued at $160 million at that time.
WaveForms has aimed to develop AI voice technologies that represent and understand human emotions, self-awareness, and self-regulation so seamlessly that they cannot be distinguished from human voice.
Two of the startup's co-founders, Alexis Kono and Coralie Lemaitre, who is a former Google advertising strategist, are known to have joined Meta. Kono participated in the co-development of the advanced voice mode neural network "GPT-4o" while working at OpenAI.