Amazon acquires Snackable AI to boost podcast offerings

San Francisco, May 6

Amazon has quietly acquired audio content discovery engine Snackable AI to strengthen its podcast features for an undisclosed sum, the media reported.

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

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

Founded in 2018, Snackable AI specialised in using AI to add structure and metadata to video and audio easily with AI-generated chapters, highlights and more.

Snackable will be working on podcast features offered through Amazon Music.

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

The deal came as Amazon and other Big Tech firms push to implement AI-driven features in their products in the ChatGPT era.

Inspired by the ChatGPT success, Amazon is now building a large language model (LLM) to power Alexa that's much larger and much more "generalised and capable", which is going to rapidly accelerate the vision of offering the world's best personal assistant.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that ChatGPT is a good example of an application that's being built.

"We'll build some of those applications ourselves. So for instance, we think one of the most compelling applications that are going to be built in generative AI have to do with making developers much more effective with coding assistance," he noted during the company's latest quarterly earnings call.

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

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