It turns out that Amazon has taken a new step to make its podcast features better. The company quietly acquired New York-based audio content discovery engine Snackable AI last December. The Snackable AI team has joined Amazon Music to work on existing podcast projects. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
According to the LinkedIn profile of Mari Joller, founder and CEO of Snackable AI, she is now an AI and machine learning product lead at Amazon Music. Joller's profile states that she leads "a team of engineers, applied scientists, and computational linguists to build AI-powered products for Amazon Music Podcasts' customers."
Snackable AI, founded in 2018, uses AI-generated segments, highlights and more. The company specializes in using AI to easily add structure and metadata to video and audio. The company's technology provides an "at-a-glance" view to make content consumption fast and efficient.
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Amazon Deals with Snackable to Develop Music Podcast
Joller's LinkedIn profile includes posts saying that Snackable AI joined Amazon "to continue to innovate and explore new experiences on behalf of Amazon Music Podcasts' customers." According to Crunchbase, Snackable AI generated $3.1 million in revenue before being acquired by Amazon.
Amazon added podcasts to its Music platform in 2020 and has been working in the podcast space ever since. It has also added new features like synchronized transcripts. The company made many of the best podcasts on its service available ad-free for Prime members last November. The Amazon Music app released an update for users to discover new podcasts they might like. This update includes a new feature called "Podcast Previews" that lets users listen to short audio recordings.
At the same time, Amazon began offering Prime subscribers a full music catalog of 100 million songs, instead of the previously limited selection of just 2 million songs. Many users believe that this update is an attempt by Amazon Music to prevent its subscribers from switching to other music services such as Appe Music or Spotify.
The tech giant started using ChatGPT after it quickly became popular with big companies like Microsoft and Google. It also completed the acquisition at a time when the company was racing to implement AI-powered features into products. Amazon was among many other tech companies to tout the potential of artificial intelligence during its latest quarterly earnings release last month. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed on a call with investors that the company is building a more "generalized and capable" big language model (LLM) to power Alexa. No official announcement was made regarding the financial details of the acquisition.
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