According to the New York Post, Amazon discreetly bought New York–based audio content discovery engine Snackable AI last December to improve its podcast capabilities. Amazon Music emailed TechCrunch on Friday that the Snackable AI team joined to work on podcast initiatives. However, the deal’s financial parameters remained unknown.
According to her LinkedIn page, Snackable AI creator and CEO Mari Joller is an Amazon Music AI and machine learning product leader. “A team of engineers, applied scientists, and computational linguists to build AI-powered products for Amazon Music Podcasts’ customers,” reads her profile.
Snackable AI was founded in 2018 to effortlessly add structure and metadata to video and audio using AI-generated chapters, highlights, and more. In addition, the company’s technology allows for “at-a-glance” information consumption.
Joller’s LinkedIn page states that Snackable AI joins Amazon “to continue innovating and exploring new experiences on behalf of Amazon Music Podcasts’ customers.” Crunchbase says Snackable AI raised $3.1 million before Amazon bought it.
Since 2020, Amazon Music has incorporated podcasts and services, including synched transcripts. Most of its popular podcasts were ad-free for Prime subscribers in November. In addition, the Amazon Music app now has “Podcast Previews” to help users find new podcasts.
Amazon has expanded its Prime music inventory to 100 million tracks from 2 million. Amazon Music hoped to steal subscribers from Apple Music and Spotify.
After OpenAI’s ChatGPT became successful, Microsoft and Google raced to add AI-powered capabilities to their businesses.
Last month’s quarterly results call by Amazon and other tech giants praised AI’s promise. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told investors the business is developing a “generalized and capable” large language model (LLM) for Alexa.
