The co-founders who sold their last startup Anchor to Spotify are launching their next project: Oboe, an AI-powered educational app that enables anyone to create lightweight, flexible learning courses on nearly any topic they choose, simply by entering a prompt.
These courses can span a variety of verticals, including topics like science, history, foreign language, news, pop culture, preparing for life changes, and more. At launch, Oboe — a name inspired by the root of the Japanese word meaning “to learn” — will offer nine different course formats. These allow users to learn in the way they prefer, Oboe co-founder Nir Zicherman explained to TechCrunch.
Zicherman founded the company along with Anchor co-founder Michael Mignano after leaving Spotify in October 2023 and taking a brief period to recharge. Zicherman said he was inspired to work on an AI educational product after working to scale Spotify’s audiobooks business, which made it easier for people to gain access to high-quality and educational content, as it was bundled with their music subscription.
Unlike AI chatbots, you don’t have to engage in back-and-forth conversations to learn with Oboe. Instead, you can opt for text and visuals, audio courses, games, interactive tests, and more.
For those who want to learn on the go, Oboe offers two audio formats. One feels more like listening to a university-style lecture, while the other is akin to Google’s podcast-like Notebook LM, as it features two hosts talking in depth about the topic.
Image Credits:Oboe
“The real magic here comes from an internal architecture that we’ve built that I would describe as a complex, multi-agent architecture that we built from scratch, each part of which is orchestrated to run in parallel as we generate a course,” Zicherman says.
“The challenge is, how do you create courses that are both high quality, entirely personalized to what the user wants to see, and also get generated extremely quickly? This all happens within seconds,” he says.
“We have agents that, in parallel, are responsible for everything from developing the course architecture to developing and verifying the base material that’s being taught, writing the script for the podcast, pulling in real images from the internet — not AI-generated images, but real images and visuals into the reading formats that we offer,” he added.
Some of Oboe’s agents audit the content to ensure the courses are accurate, high-quality, and personalized to what the user wants to learn.
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