As investors, we get the privilege to meet founders who are building the future. Every once in a while, we see something that’s magical. When I met PlayAI, I had come face to face with sorcery.

Using natural language as the next interface for devices is a decades-old vision. But arriving at that future required fundamental breakthroughs to get beyond the rigid, robotic interfaces of Siri, Alexa and the like. Mahmoud Felfel and Hammad Syed, co-founders of PlayAI, were the first founders I met in 2022 that were using transformer models to create human quality conversational voice that captured the tones and inflections that were natural parts of the human voice. But the idea was born earlier - frustration around regional access to content. As Egyptian founders, Mahmoud and Hammad represent something we believe deeply at 500 Global - that solving localized challenges can be key to unlocking global solutions.

PlayAI started by pushing the boundaries of innovation on STT (speech-to-text) and TTS (text-to-speech) models. They identified that conversational voice was a specific use-case and quickly developed techniques for data, pre-training and post training state of the art models that could handle human conversation. Today, PlayAI has built the APIs and no-code platform to enable the hundreds of thousands of developers and businesses to build real time conversational voice agents.

Play’s technology will free us from our current interim state where we are visually glued to our devices to one where we can interact with devices in an untethered way, the way we are with the natural world. We are excited to see them join Meta’s superintelligence lab to continue this vision.

As an aside, earlier this year I predicted Meta would be the first place where users interact with agents at scale. They provide a constrained environment where individuals are already interacting with businesses and each other. We look forward to the ways PlayAI will help power the billions of individuals, businesses and governments around the world with powerful voice agents.

Hear more from Mahmoud Felfel and Tony Wang by watching their AI Salon conversation here.