Building Snipd: The AI Podcast App for Learning

**swyx** (0:03)
Hey, I'm here in New York with Kevin Ben-Smith or Snipt. Welcome.

**Kevin Ben-Smith** (0:08)
Hi. Hi. Amazing to be here.

**swyx** (0:09)
Yeah. This is our first ever, I think, outdoors podcast recording.

**Kevin Ben-Smith** (0:14)
It's quite a location for the first time.

**swyx** (0:18)
I was actually unsure because it's cold, it's like, I checked the temperature, it's like one degree Celsius. But it's not that bad with the sun.

**Kevin Ben-Smith** (0:25)
No, it's quite nice. Yeah, especially with our beautiful tea.

**swyx** (0:28)
With the tea. Yeah. Perfect. We're going to talk about Snips. I'm a Snips user. I had to basically, apart from Twitter, it's like the number one use app on my phone. Nice. When I wake up in the morning, I open Snips and I see what's new.
I think in terms of time spent or usage on my phone, I think it's number one and number two. Nice. I really had to talk about it. Also because I think people interested in AI want to think about, we're an AI podcast, we have to talk about the AI Podcast app. But before we get there, we just finished the AI Engineer Summit, and you came for the two days. How was it?

**Kevin Ben-Smith** (1:08)
It was quite incredible. For me, the most valuable was just being in the same room with like-minded people who are building the future and who are seeing the future. Especially when it comes to AI agents, it's so often I have conversations with friends who are not in the AI world, and it's like so quickly it happens that you, it sounds like you're talking in science fiction. And it's just crazy talk. It was, you know, it's so refreshing to talk with so many other people who already see these things and, yeah, be inspired then by them, and not always feel like, like, okay, I think I'm just crazy, and like, this will never happen. It really is happening. And for me, it was very valuable.

**swyx** (1:51)
So day two more relevant for you than day one?

**Kevin Ben-Smith** (1:53)
Yeah, day two, so day two was the engineering track. That was definitely the most valuable for me, like, also as a practitioner myself. Especially there were one or two talks that had to do with voice AI and AI agents with voice. So that was quite fascinating. I also spoke with the speakers afterwards.

**swyx** (2:11)
Yeah.

**Kevin Ben-Smith** (2:11)
And yeah, they were also very open and, you know, this sharing attitudes that's, I think, in general quite prevalent in the AI community. I also learned a lot like really practical things that I can now take away with me.

**swyx** (2:25)
Yeah, I mean, on my side, I think I watched only like half of the talks as I was running around. And I think people saw me like towards the end, I was kind of collapsing. I was on the floor like towards the end because I needed to get a rest. But yeah, I'm excited to watch the voice AI talks myself.

**Kevin Ben-Smith** (2:43)
Yeah, yeah, do that. And I mean, from my side, thanks a lot for organizing this conference, for bringing everyone together.

**swyx** (2:49)
Do you have anything like this in Switzerland?

**Kevin Ben-Smith** (2:53)
The short answer is no. I mean, I have to say the AI community in especially Zurich, where we're based, it is quite good and it's growing, especially driven by ETH, the Technical University there, and all of the big companies, they have AI teams there. Google has the biggest tech hub outside of the US in Zurich. Facebook is doing a lot in reality labs. Apple has a secret AI team. OpenAI and SwapBit just announced that they're coming to Zurich. So there's a lot happening.

**swyx** (3:23)
Yeah, I think the most recent notable move, I think the entire vision team from Google, Lucas Byer, and all the other authors of Siglip left Google to join OpenAI, which I thought was like, it's like a big move for a whole team to move all at once. Oh, at the same time, so I've been to Zurich and it just feels expensive. Like it's a great city, a great university, but I don't see it as like a business hub. Is it a business hub? I guess it is, right? Like it's kind of...

**Kevin Ben-Smith** (3:52)
Well, historically, it's a finance hub.

**swyx** (3:55)
Finance hub?

**Kevin Ben-Smith** (3:55)
Yeah, I mean, there are some large banks there, right? Especially UBS, the largest wealth manager in the world. But it's really becoming more of a tech hub now with all of the big tech companies there.