Play.ht
Voice cloning pioneer — acquired by Meta, shut down end of 2025.
Overview
Play.ht (rebranded PlayAI) was a text-to-speech and voice-cloning platform used by audiobook publishers and podcasters. Meta acquired the company in July 2025 and shut the standalone product down by early 2026; the play.ht domain no longer resolves and there is no successor service.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 11 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
Use cases
ASEAN Perspective
Play.ht in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
Note: Meta acquired PlayAI in July 2025 and shut down the standalone Play.ht product by early 2026.
Play.ht (later PlayAI) was a capable text-to-speech and voice-cloning platform — a large multilingual voice library, fast instant cloning, and a low-latency streaming API used in real-time voice agents and IVR. None of that is usable today. Meta acquired the company in July 2025 to fold its voice team into Meta AI and wearables work, and by the end of that year shut the standalone product down: accounts, saved audio, voice clones and API access were deleted, with no migration path offered to customers. The play.ht domain now sits parked on Meta's nameservers and does not resolve. Anyone still budgeting for Play.ht/PlayAI needs to move immediately — ElevenLabs and Murf AI are the most commonly cited replacements. This entry should be marked defunct rather than reviewed as an active product.
What people say
Play.ht is gone. Meta acquired the voice-AI startup — by then rebranded PlayAI — in July 2025, folding its roughly 35-person team into Meta's AI Characters and wearables group under Johan Schalkwyk. The standalone product didn't survive the transition: by the end of 2025 accounts, saved audio, and cloned voices were being deleted, the data-export window closed December 31, and the play.ht domain now sits parked on Meta's own nameservers, resolving to nothing.
Before the acquisition, the reviews were already a mixed bag. Users liked the voice quality and the sheer size of the library — 900-plus voices across 142 languages — and the instant cloning feature was a genuine draw for audiobook and podcast producers. But G2 and Trustpilot reviewers had been flagging real problems for a while: cloning quality that degraded under server load, clone samples that needed far more than the advertised 10 seconds of audio to sound right, and a support team that some paying customers said went silent for weeks while billing kept running. Commercial review sites had the product sitting around a 2.4 average by the time it disappeared — a score dragged down by exactly those billing and support complaints rather than the core voice tech.
There's no successor product and no official migration tool. Sites now describing themselves as "PlayHT" or similar are unaffiliated copycats, not a revival — treat any of those with the same caution as a random new voice-cloning startup, not as continuity with the original.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
Notable facts
- Play.ht's voice cloning requires only 30 seconds of audio — the shortest sample requirement of any major voice cloning platform.
- The platform's streaming API achieves voice synthesis latency under 300 milliseconds, enabling real-time conversational applications.
- Play.ht supports 142 languages and accents — the broadest language coverage of any TTS API, including rare languages not supported by Google or AWS TTS services.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Play.ht's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Play.ht unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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