Amazon takes over Snackable AI to increase podcast services

Amazon has discreetly bought audio content search engine Snackable AI to boost its podcast capabilities for an unknown fee, the media reported.

The Snackable AI team joined Amazon Music to work on existing podcast initiatives.

Mari Joller, Founder and CEO of Snackable, is now working as an artificial intelligence and machine learning product leader at Amazon, says The New York Post.

Founded in 2018, Snackable AI focused in applying AI to add structure and information to video and audio simply using AI-generated chapters, highlights and more.

Snackable will be focusing on podcast features available via Amazon Music.

Prior to its purchase by Amazon, Snackable had received a total of $3.1 million from investors.

The agreement occurred as Amazon and other Big Tech companies try to add AI-driven capabilities in their products in the ChatGPT era.

Inspired by the ChatGPT success, Amazon is now constructing a large language model (LLM) to power Alexa that's considerably bigger and much more "generalised and capable", which is going to swiftly accelerate the ambition of giving the world's finest personal assistant.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy noted that ChatGPT is an excellent example of an application that's being constructed.

"We'll construct some of those apps ourselves. So for instance, we believe one of the most interesting applications that are going to be created in generative AI have to do with making developers much more productive with coding help," he stated during the company's last quarterly earnings call.

"I think there's a significant business model underneath it," he continued.

"We've been investing in building our own large language models for several years, and we have a very large investment across the company," added Jassy.