After about three years at Amazon working on Alexa voice services, Pierson Marks listened to his own internal dialogue and left to launch a startup.
A Southern California native who studied computer science at UCLA, Marks stayed in Seattle to create Jellypod, an AI-powered service that turns daily newsletters into personalized podcasts.
“Voice has always been something that was I was pretty passionate about,” Marks said.
He’s also passionate about staying informed and digesting credible sources of information. But the newsletters and flood of content in his email inbox was overwhelming him on a daily basis.
“I thought there has to be a way to take all this content that I’m already subscribed to, take the most important topics from them, summarize them, and combine them all into one 10-to-15 minute daily digest podcast,” Marks said.
Using open source and fine-tuned AI models, Marks built Jellypod’s underlying tech to extract key details across a wide range of newsletters. It was a challenge to create a system that could process all of that information and de-duplicate topics along the way.
The goal was “to piece everything together in a way that’s natural sounding, just like a human podcast host would do,” Marks said.
Jellypod launched in December and is available on iOS. With a free version, users can create a 6-minute podcast that plays through the app. A premium version can be purchased through the app and it allows users to add more newsletters, get longer podcasts, and export podcasts to other players. Podcast release schedules can also be set up, if you like listening on the way to work, at lunch, or whenever.
Listeners can choose between six voices — three male and three female.
The goal was ‘to piece everything together in a way that’s natural sounding, just like a human podcast host would do’
— Pierson Marks
Jellypod crossed 1,000 users in April, with 10% subscribed to premium version. The startup is bootstrapped so far, but Marks said he plans to raise money soon.
Asked about any rights issues related to the original newsletter provider, Marks said Jellypod is not redistributing content and is merely summarizing content and reading it back in audio format. He compared it to Blinkist, which provides digestible summaries of books and podcasts.
If anything, he believes his product encourages people to actually consume the newsletter content they already subscribe to.
“I can’t go through my inbox every day, but I listen to my podcasts every day,” Marks said. “And then I hear something in there and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s a really interesting thing that they just talked about. Let me go back to the whole newsletter now, I’m gonna prioritize that.'”
Marks wants to use his tech skills to help more people stay informed. He thinks younger generations are spending too much time on super-short-form, non-authoritative sources of information, including social media.
“I’m a huge believer in this idea that long-form content by writers that have the knowledge and background to actually be writing about things is how we should be consuming and learning about the world,” Marks said. “And so to make that easier for people via audio is just what I’m really passionate about.”