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We first met Snipd (affiliate link! we get a free month, you get a free month. but this is not a sponsored pod, we’ve never done one) over a year ago, and were immediately impressed by the design, but were doubtful about the behavior of snipping as the title behavior:

Podcast apps are enormously sticky - Spotify spent almost $1b in podcast acquisitions and exclusive content just to get an 8% bump in market share among normies.

However, after a disappointing Overcast 2.0 rewrite with no AI features in the last 3 years, I finally bit the bullet and switched to Snipd.

It’s 2025, your podcast app should be able to let you search transcripts of your podcasts. Snipd is the best implementation of this so far.

And yet they keep shipping:

What impressed us wasn’t just how this tiny team of 4 was able to bootstrap a consumer AI app against massive titans and do so well; but also how seriously they think about learning through podcasts and improving retention of knowledge over time, aka “Duolingo for podcasts”.

As an educational AI podcast, that’s a mission we can get behind.

Full Video Pod

Find us on YouTube! This was the first pod we’ve ever shot outdoors!

Show Notes

* How does Shazam work?

* Flutter/FlutterFlow

* wav2vec paper

* Perplexity Online LLM

* Google Search Grounding

* Comparing Snipd transcription with our Bee episode

* NIPS 2017 Flo Rida

* Gustav Söderström - Background Audio

Timestamps

* [00:00:03] Takeaways from AI Engineer NYC

* [00:00:17] Weather in New York.

* [00:00:26] Swyx and Snipd.

* [00:01:01] Kevin's AI summit experience.

* [00:01:31] Zurich and AI.

* [00:03:25] SigLIP authors join OpenAI.

* [00:03:39] Zurich is very costly.

* [00:04:06] The Snipd origin story.

* [00:05:24] Introduction to machine learning.

* [00:09:28] Snipd and user knowledge extraction.

* [00:13:48] App's tech stack, Flutter, Python.

* [00:15:11] How speakers are identified.

* [00:18:29] The concept of "backgroundable" video.

* [00:29:05] Voice cloning technology.

* [00:31:03] Using AI agents.

* [00:34:32] Snipd's future is multi-modal AI.

* [00:36:37] Snipd and existing user behaviour.

* [00:42:10] The app, summary, and timestamps.

* [00:55:25] The future of AI and podcasting.

* [1:14:55] Voice AI

Transcript

swyx [00:00:03]: Hey, I'm here in New York with Kevin Ben-Smith of Snipd. Welcome.

Kevin [00:00:07]: Hi. Hi. Amazing to be here.

swyx [00:00:09]: Yeah. This is our first ever, I think, outdoors podcast recording.

Kevin [00:00:14]: It's quite a location for the first time, I have to say.

swyx [00:00:18]: I was actually unsure because, you know, it's cold. It's like, I checked the temperature. It's like kind of one degree Celsius, but it's not that bad with the sun. No, it's quite nice. Yeah. Especially with our beautiful tea. With the tea. Yeah. Perfect. We're going to talk about Snips. I'm a Snips user. I'm a Snips user. I had to basically, you know, apart from Twitter, it's like the number one use app on my phone. Nice. When I wake up in the morning, I open Snips and I, you know, see what's new. And I think in terms of time spent or usage on my phone, I think it's number one or number two. Nice. Nice. So I really had to talk about it also because I think people interested in AI want to think about like, how can we, we're an AI podcast, we have to talk about the AI podcast app. But before we get there, we just finished. We just finished the AI Engineer Summit and you came for the two days. How was it?

Kevin [00:01:07]: It was quite incredible. I mean, for me, the most valuable was just being in the same room with like-minded people who are building the future and who are seeing the future. You know, especially when it comes to AI agents, it's so often I have conversations with friends who are not in the AI world. And it's like so quickly it happens that you, it sounds like you're talking in science fiction. And it's just crazy talk. It was, you know, it's so refreshing to talk with so many other people who already see these things and yeah, be inspired then by them and not always feel like, like, okay, I think I'm just crazy. And like, this will never happen. It really is happening. And for me, it was very valuable. So day two, more relevant, more relevant for you than day one. Yeah. Day two. So day two was the engineering track. Yeah. That was definitely the most valuable for me. Like also as a producer. Practitioner myself, especially there were one or two talks that had to do with voice AI and AI agents with voice. Okay. So that was quite fascinating. Also spoke with the speakers afterwards. Yeah. And yeah, they were also very open and, and, you know, this, this sharing attitudes that's, I think in general, quite prevalent in the AI community. I also learned a lot, like really practical things that I can now take away with me. Yeah.

swyx [00:02:25]: I mean, on my side, I, I think I watched only like half of the talks. Cause I was running around and I think people saw me like towards the end, I was kind of collapsing. I was on the floor, like, uh, towards the end because I, I needed to get, to get a rest, but yeah, I'm excited to watch the voice AI talks myself.

Kevin [00:02:43]: Yeah. Yeah. Do that. And I mean, from my side, thanks a lot for organizing this conference for bringing everyone together. Do you have anything like this in Switzerland? The short answer is no. Um, I mean, I have to say the AI community in, especially Zurich, where. Yeah. Where we're, where we're based. Yeah. It is quite good. And it's growing, uh, especially driven by ETH, the, the technical university there and all of the big companies, they have AI teams there. Google, like Google has the biggest tech hub outside of the U S in Zurich. Yeah. Facebook is doing a lot in reality labs. Uh, Apple has a secret AI team, open AI and then SwapBit just announced that they're coming to Zurich. Yeah. Um, so there's a lot happening. Yeah.

swyx [00:03:23]: So, yeah, uh, I think the most recent notable move, I think the entire vision team from Google. Uh, Lucas buyer, um, and, and all the other authors of Siglip left Google to join open AI, which I thought was like, it's like a big move for a whole team to move all at once at the same time. So I've been to Zurich and it just feels expensive. Like it's a great city. Yeah. It's great university, but I don't see it as like a business hub. Is it a business hub? I guess it is. Right.

Kevin [00:03:51]: Like it's kind of, well, historically it's, uh, it's a finance hub, finance hub. Yeah. I mean, there are some, some large banks there, right? Especially UBS, uh, the, the largest wealth manager in the world, but it's really becoming more of a tech hub now with all of the big, uh, tech companies there.

swyx [00:04:08]: I guess. Yeah. Yeah. And, but we, and research wise, it's all ETH. Yeah. There's some other things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin [00:04:13]: It's all driven by ETH. And then, uh, it's sister university EPFL, which is in Lausanne. Okay. Um, which they're also doing a lot, but, uh, it's, it's, it's really ETH. Uh, and otherwise, no, I mean, it's a beautiful, really beautiful city. I can recommend. To anyone. To come, uh, visit Zurich, uh, uh, let me know, happy to show you around and of course, you know, you, you have the nature so close, you have the mountains so close, you have so, so beautiful lakes. Yeah. Um, I think that's what makes it such a livable city. Yeah.

swyx [00:04:42]: Um, and the cost is not, it's not cheap, but I mean, we're in New York city right now and, uh, I don't know, I paid $8 for a coffee this morning, so, uh, the coffee is cheaper in Zurich than the New York city. Okay. Okay. Let's talk about Snipt. What is Snipt and, you know, then we'll talk about your origin story, but I just, let's, let's get a crisp, what is Snipt? Yeah.

Kevin [00:05:03]: I always ...

Building Snipd: The AI Podcast App for Learning