In 2016, Hammad Syed and Mahmud Felfel, former engineers at WatsaApp, developed a text-to-speech Chrome extension designed to read Medium articles clearly. The extension quickly gained the attention of various users, and a year later, they founded PlayAI.
Play AI was formerly PlayHT, and it has since evolved into a significant player in the voice cloning and AI speech generation market.
Hammad and Mahmud said, “This company aims to provide different tools to organizations to create realistic and human-like audio for their applications without the need to develop their models.”
In addition, PlayHT offers an API that allows users to choose predefined voices and clone voices to integrate into their Apps.
PlayAI’s platform enables users to customize voices, adjusting aspects like tone and intonation. It also provides a dashboard for creating polished audio narrations and voice-overs.
Recently, the company has expanded into AI agents that offer solutions to automate tasks like answering customer calls. One of the most exciting innovations that we have observed in this company is PlayNote, which transforms various types of content, such as PDFs, videos, and photos, into podcast-style shows, summaries, or even debates.
PlayNote uses AI to generate scripts based on the uploaded files and then produces the final audio. This tool’s ability to process images and videos, turning them into audio content, shows the growing capabilities of AI-powered tools.
However, like most AI systems, PlayNote occasionally produces unexpected or wrong outputs.
PlayAI’s advanced speech synthesis model is PlayDialog, which takes AI conversations to the next level by maintaining context, emotions, and pacing throughout a conversation.
PlayDialog enables more natural dialogue generation by considering a conversation’s flow and history. Its voice cloning service allows users to generate high-quality voice clones, but there are concerns about its potential misuse.
