Amazon quietly acquires audio content discovery engine Snackable AI to power podcast projects

As first reported by Amazon, it quietly acquired New York-based audio content material discovery engine Snackable AI final December to spice up its podcast capabilities. New York Post. The tech big advised TechCrunch on Friday that its Snackable AI crew is becoming a member of Amazon Music to work on current podcast initiatives. Monetary phrases of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Snackable AI founder and CEO Mari Joller He’s now the AI ​​and machine studying product chief at Amazon Music, in line with his LinkedIn profile. His profile states that “Amazon Music Podcasts leads a crew of engineers, utilized scientists, and computational linguists to create AI-powered merchandise for his or her prospects.”

Based in 2018, Snackable AI focuses on utilizing AI to simply add construction and metadata to video and audio with AI-generated episodes, highlights, and extra. The corporate’s expertise supplies an “at-a-glance” view to make content material consumption quick and environment friendly.

Joller’s LinkedIn profile says Snackable AI has joined Amazon “to proceed innovating and discovering new experiences on behalf of Amazon Music Podcasts’ prospects.” Snackable AI raised $3.1 million earlier than being acquired by Amazon. Crunchbase.

Amazon added podcasts to its Music platform in 2020 and has since been enhancing the providing and including new options like synchronized transcripts. Final November, the corporate rolled out lots of the finest podcasts on its service ad-free for Prime members. The Amazon Music app has been up to date to incorporate a brand new “Podcast Previews” characteristic that lets prospects hearken to quick clips as a technique to uncover new podcasts they may like.

On the identical time, Amazon started providing Prime subscribers a full music catalog of 100 million songs as a substitute of the beforehand restricted number of simply 2 million songs. The transfer was seen as a approach for Amazon Music to distance some subscribers from different music providers like Apple Music or Spotify.

The tech big accomplished the acquisition at a time when main corporations, together with Microsoft and Google, have been racing to implement AI-powered options into merchandise after OpenAI’s ChatGPT was launched and subsequently popularized.

Amazon was amongst many different tech corporations that highlighted the potential of synthetic intelligence throughout its final quarterly earnings name final month. In a dialog with buyers, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy defined that the corporate is constructing a extra “generalized and succesful” massive language mannequin (LLM) to energy Alexa.