The web is full of information trapped in unsearchable audio. Podz has a fix
Right now, the world is drowning in podcasts. In February 2018, there were an estimated 500,000 active podcasts in existence. Today, that number is in excess of 1.7 million, with a total of more than 43 million episodes. And yet, for all that, podcast discoverability is, to put it nicely, horrendous.
This is where a new startup enters the picture. Podz, co-founded by a team who first met while working at Yahoo, seeks to find a way to solve the findability conundrum that besets today’s podcasts. More than that, though, it’s got far grander, far more significant designs: To do for the world’s audio archives what Google has done for search. Namely, to organize it and make it universally accessible and useful.
In an attempt to “fix” podcast discoverability, Podz has created an A.I. trained on 100,000 hours of audio, which scours through the most popular 5,000 podcasts (that’s the overwhelming majority of podcasts most people listen to) and creates the most engaging 60-second sample snippets to populate an audio news feed.
What Podz really wants to do — and, if it can pull it off, this is a multibillion dollar idea — is to make the audio space as searchable as the text space.
Right now, this is “fly before you walk” stuff for a startup — albeit a well-funded one, with investors including Katie Couric and Paris Hilton.
See the full story here: https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/audio-internet-podcasts-search-podz/
