Should you take heed to a number of podcasts, there’s a likelihood you may keep in mind humorous tidbits and are questioning… “Wait, who talked about consuming fries with sriracha once more?” or extra severe questions. To search for the solutions, it’s a must to first discover the podcast after which search via their transcripts. Dexa is attempting to make podcast search simpler by leveraging AI.

The software helps you to ask questions on a single podcast, like Andrew Humberman’s Huberman Lab podcast within the screenshot beneath, or question all of the podcasts in Dexa’s database — there are at the moment greater than 120 with extra being added. The search outcomes gives you an AI-generated abstract of the reply together with tips to podcasts the place the participant mentioned the subject.

As an illustration, you may ask questions like “What’s the easiest way to get extra sleep?” and discover solutions to that from Dexa’s podcast library with timestamped hyperlinks to these conversations. You can too @point out a particular podcast to slender down your search outcomes.

Picture Credit: Dexa

Once I requested Dexa “What does Mark Zuckerberg take into consideration Threads?” it returned the outcomes of his dialog on Lex Friedman’s present concerning the social community. Nevertheless it additionally confirmed me outcomes the place podcast hosts have been speaking about Mark Zuckerberg’s remark about Threads on one other platform.

You can too share these searches and outcomes with others via hyperlinks. Due to this, Dexa is ready to additionally index a few of the content material for search engines like google and yahoo like Google.

The corporate

Dexa was began by Riley Tomasek in 2023, who beforehand co-founded an app referred to as Flight for customers to seize notes, photographs, and concepts on completely 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 wished to take a complement Huberman advised however forgot the dosage. So he began looking again for when the neuroscientist talked about it and the method took a very long time.

“After this expertise, I made a decision I’m going to construct one thing to make this simpler as a result of I don’t need to undergo this course of once more. So I transcribed all of the episodes and used instruments 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 a number of podcasters talked about folks not with the ability to discover particular content material.

The startup makes use of completely different indexing strategies combined with a information graph of individuals, episodes, and reveals to energy its search. Tomasek stated the software launched practically 9 months in the past, and has answered over 1 million queries with 50,000 folks visiting the location 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 the moment has three folks on the staff 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 can be embedded on the podcast’s website. For that, the startup has educated 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 principally been natural with podcasters referring folks in direction of the software. He stated that this technique nonetheless has momentum as the corporate works with in style podcasters. So it isn’t trying to put money into outreach for the time being.

“We briefly tried promoting on podcasts, and discovered that our makes an attempt resulted in a relationship the place we listed their content material, added it to Dexa, they usually began to organically speak about it,” he stated.

The corporate just isn’t at the moment making any cash, however it has thought-about each subscriptions and adverts as sources of income because it scales.

Dexa additionally plans to construct a cellular app, the place it will possibly drive extra consumption to podcasts via brief clips. Moreover, the corporate is planning to introduce account creation so folks can save their searches.

Alternatives and challenges

There are many instruments together with Riverside, Podcastle, and MusixMatch that assist podcasters with transcription. By way of search, the newly pivoted Very Disco is attempting to turn out to be a type of IMDB of podcasts with data like books, folks, and TV reveals 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 folks to retrieve a particular particular person’s opinions via podcasts. However his motive for not embedding such a search in MusixMatch is that he feels textual content just isn’t the easiest way to work together with LLMs.

“I really feel that typing on a chat just isn’t the perfect UX for assistants. As an alternative, for this use case I strongly imagine that voice is the long run,” he stated.

Ben Cmejla, accomplice 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 belief it builds with customers and content material companions. Dexa’s strategy places belief first — consumer belief that solutions to their questions come from human specialists, and accomplice belief that their content material can be showcased, not simply used for coaching knowledge or anonymized summaries,” he stated.