In case you hearken to numerous podcasts, there’s a probability you would possibly keep in mind humorous tidbits and are questioning… “Wait, who talked about eating fries with sriracha again?” or extra critical questions. To search for the solutions, you must first discover the podcast after which search by means of their transcripts. Dexa is attempting to make podcast search simpler by leveraging AI.
The device helps you to ask questions on a single podcast, like Andrew Humberman’s Huberman Lab podcast within the screenshot under, or question all of the podcasts in Dexa’s database — there are at present greater than 120 with extra being added. The search outcomes gives you an AI-generated abstract of the reply together with tips that could podcasts the place the participant mentioned the subject.
As an example, you’ll be able to ask questions like “What’s the best way to get more sleep?” and find answers to that from Dexa’s podcast library with timestamped hyperlinks to these conversations. You too can @point out a selected podcast to slim down your search outcomes.
Picture Credit: Dexa
After I requested Dexa “What does Mark Zuckerberg think about Threads?” it returned the outcomes of his dialog on Lex Friedman’s present in regards to the social community. Nevertheless it additionally confirmed me outcomes the place podcast hosts had been speaking about Mark Zuckerberg’s remark about Threads on one other platform.
You too can share these searches and outcomes with others by means of hyperlinks. Due to this, Dexa is ready to additionally index a few of the content material for search engines like google like Google.
The corporate
Dexa was began by Riley Tomasek in 2023, who beforehand co-founded an app known as Flight for customers to seize notes, photos, and concepts on totally different boards and collaborate throughout them. The corporate was acquired by Figma in 2021.
Tomasek stated that he actually acquired into well being. As a part of his information constructing section, he listened to the Huberman Labs podcast. He needed to take a complement Huberman advised however forgot the dosage. So he began looking out again for when the neuroscientist talked about it and the method took a very long time.
“After this experience, I decided I’m going to build something to make this easier because I don’t want to go through this process again. So I transcribed all the episodes and used tools like OpenAI’s embeddings and Whisper to make the search work and posted it on X,” Tomasek stated.
After Tomasek posted about his instruments Huberman retweeted it and that generated inbound curiosity from podcasters and listeners for the instruments’ growth. He stated that numerous podcasters talked about individuals not with the ability to discover particular content material.
The startup makes use of totally different indexing strategies combined with a information graph of individuals, episodes, and exhibits to energy its search. Tomasek stated the device launched almost 9 months in the past, and has answered over 1 million queries with 50,000 individuals visiting the positioning every month.
Dexa has raised $6 million in seed funding led by Summary Ventures and The Common Partnership with participation from Maple VC and Guillermo Rauch. The corporate at present has three individuals on the crew and it now plans to rent extra engineering employees.
The corporate is launching a redesigned website and saying a partnership with Huberman Labs the place Dexa’s search will probably be embedded on the podcast’s website. For that, the startup has skilled a particular mannequin — consider it as a GPT in ChatGPT.
The brand new design lets customers ask follow-up questions and lets them watch the linked dialog with out having to depart the window.
Future roadmap
Dexa’s progress has largely been natural with podcasters referring individuals in direction of the device. He stated that this methodology nonetheless has momentum as the corporate works with well-liked podcasters. So it isn’t seeking to put money into outreach in the intervening time.
“We briefly tried advertising on podcasts, and found out that our attempts ended in a relationship where we indexed their content, added it to Dexa, and they started to organically talk about it,” he stated.
The corporate will not be at present making any cash, nevertheless it has thought-about each subscriptions and advertisements as sources of income because it scales.
Dexa additionally plans to construct a cellular app, the place it might probably drive extra consumption to podcasts by means of quick clips. Moreover, the corporate is planning to introduce account creation so individuals can save their searches.
Alternatives and challenges
There are many instruments together with Riverside, Podcastle, and MusixMatch that assist podcasters with transcription. When it comes to search, the newly pivoted Very Disco is attempting to develop into a type of IMDB of podcasts with data like books, individuals, and TV exhibits talked about in podcasts.
MusixMatch’s chief product officer Marco Paglia sees the promise in what he calls the “assistant-driven UX” of Dexa. Plus, he feels that there’s potential in permitting individuals to retrieve a selected particular person’s opinions by means of podcasts. However his purpose for not embedding such a search in MusixMatch is that he feels textual content will not be one of the best ways to work together with LLMs.
“I feel that typing on a chat is not the best UX for assistants. Instead, for this use case I strongly believe that voice is the future,” he stated.
Ben Cmejla, companion at The Common Partnership, believes that Dexa’s strategy of utilizing information from creators for search is exclusive.
“A platform’s success or failure will hinge on the trust it builds with users and content partners. Dexa’s approach puts trust first — user trust that answers to their questions come from human experts, and partner trust that their content will be showcased, not just used for training data or anonymized summaries,” he stated.
