Meta has purchased AI voice startup WaveForms for an undisclosed sum, marking the latest addition to its new AI division, Superintelligence Labs. The deal follows Meta’s acquisition of PlayAI just last month, signaling an accelerated push into AI audio technology.
A Rapidly Rising Startup
WaveForms was founded only eight months ago and quickly attracted significant investment, securing $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz in a funding round that valued the company at $160 million pre-money, according to PitchBook data.
Two of the startup’s co-founders — Alexis Conneau, a former Meta and OpenAI researcher, and Coralie Lemaitre, a former Google advertising strategist — have reportedly joined Meta. While at OpenAI, Conneau co-created the GPT4-o Advanced Voice Mode neural networks.
WaveForms’ mission, as described on its now-removed website and its LinkedIn page, was to solve the “Speech Turing Test,” which measures whether listeners can tell the difference between human and AI-generated speech. The company was also developing what it called “Emotional General Intelligence,” an approach aimed at understanding individual self-awareness and emotional management.
It’s not yet confirmed whether chief technologist Kartikay Khandelwal or the rest of the team’s roughly 14 employees, based on LinkedIn profiles, will also move to Meta.
What The Author Thinks
Meta’s rapid-fire acquisitions in AI audio suggest it wants to own every layer of the voice technology stack, from realism in speech generation to emotional nuance. That could give it a serious edge in developing lifelike AI assistants, but it also raises the stakes in the race to make AI voices indistinguishable from humans — a capability that will need careful oversight to avoid misuse.
Featured image credit: Heute
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