Meta acquired the startup WaveForms, which creates the voice for AI.

WaveForms was launched just eight months ago and has already attracted $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation of $160 million.

The two co-founders — former Meta and OpenAI researcher Alexis Connau and former Google advertising strategist Coralie Lemaitre — have already moved to Meta. Connau, while working at OpenAI, contributed to the development of GPT4-o Advanced Voice Mode.

The WaveForms website is currently unavailable, but on LinkedIn the company described its mission as solving the Turing speech test — a check to determine whether a listener can distinguish a human voice from an AI-generated one. Another area of focus was the Emotional General Intelligence project — technology capable of understanding emotional states and managing them.

Source: Tech Crunch