Building Snipd: The AI Podcast App for Learning
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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
