Amazon Quietly Acquires Audio Content Search Engine Snackable AI to Boost Podcast Projects

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As first reported by the New York Post, Amazon quietly acquired New York-based audio content search engine Snackable AI last December to boost its podcast capabilities. The tech giant told TechCrunch in an email on Friday that the Snackable AI team has joined Amazon Music to work on an existing podcast project. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Snackable AI Founder and CEO Mari Joller is currently the leader in AI and machine learning products for Amazon Music, according to her LinkedIn profile. Her profile reads, “Leading a team of engineers, applied scientists, and computational linguists to build AI-powered products for Amazon Music Podcasts customers.”

Founded in 2018, Snackable AI specializes in using AI to easily add structure and metadata to video and audio, providing AI-generated chapters, highlights, and more. The company’s technology provides an “at-a-glance” view to help you consume content quickly and efficiently.

According to Joller’s LinkedIn profile, Snackable AI joined Amazon “to continue to innovate and explore new experiences on behalf of Amazon Music Podcasts customers.” He raised $3.1 million in funding before Snackable AI was acquired by Amazon, according to Crunchbase.

Since Amazon added podcasts to its music platform in 2020, it has been building the service and adding new features like synced transcripts. Last November, the company made most of the top of his podcasts on the service available ad-free for Prime members. The Amazon Music app has also been updated to include a new “podcast preview” feature that lets customers listen to short clips as a way to discover new podcasts they love.

At the same time, Amazon began offering Prime subscribers a complete music catalog of 100 million songs. The move was seen as a way for Amazon Music to draw some subscribers away from other music services such as Apple Music and Spotify.

The tech giant completed the acquisition at a time when major companies such as Microsoft and Google were racing to implement AI-powered features into their products following the launch and subsequent popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Amazon is one of many other tech companies touting the potential of AI in its latest quarterly earnings call last month. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on a conference call with investors that the company is building a more “generalized and capable” Large Language Model (LLM) to power Alexa. clarified.