Audio generation app Huxe, founded by former NotebookLM developers, shuts down
Quick Answer
Huxe, an audio generation app by ex-NotebookLM developers, is shutting down just after Spotify launched a competing feature.
Quick Take
The app will be removed from stores, and user data will be deleted after seven days, highlighting the competitive landscape in consumer AI.
Key Points
- Huxe was founded by former Google employees and raised $4.6 million in funding.
- The app allowed users to generate podcasts from prompts but faced competition from Spotify.
- Data deletion will occur seven days after the app's removal from stores.
- The consumer AI market is increasingly competitive, with many companies offering similar features.
- Startups focusing on single conversion modalities may struggle to maintain user engagement.
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readHuxe, an app created by former NotebookLM developers that let users put in a prompt and generate a podcast or a podcast series about a topic, is shutting down. The announcement comes a day after Spotify released a personal podcast feature that works similarly.
The company said that it is removing the app from App Store and Play Store, and if users already have the app installed, it will work for seven days. After that, the company will delete all data related to users. The startup didn’t specify the reason behind the shutdown.
“We’ve made the decision to wind down Huxe. The team is moving on to new things, and we won’t be continuing development of the product,” according to an email sent to customers.
The consumer AI market is highly competitive, as core products of startups often turn into commoditized features of large companies. Podcast creation for knowledge is on a similar trajectory. After NotebookLM popularized the feature, other big companies like Adobe, Amazon, ElevenLabs, Meta, and now Spotify emulated the feature in a way. Google also released a separate feature to create podcasts based on your Discover feed.
Huxe was started in late 2024 by former Google employees Raiza Martin, along with Jason Spielman and Stephen Hughes. The startup had raised $4.6 million in funding from Conviction, Genius Ventures, Figma CEO Dylan Field, and Google Research’s chief scientist Jeff Dean.
Other startups, Anchor co-founders and former Spotify execs’ app Oboe, and Sun, which is part of an a16z speedrun cohort, are attempting to build an audience for audio-focused learning.
As AI models get better, they are able to convert one format to another, from text to audio, and audio to video. Companies that focus on only one kind of conversion modality for consumers might find it difficult to bring long-term usage and revenue to their apps.
Because of AI, companies are shipping features fast and bringing their products to feature parity, which might affect some startups. In Huxe’s case, generating a podcast about a topic became a commoditized feature in many apps and services. This could have proved difficult to scale the service to millions of users and have them pay for the app.
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Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web.
You can contact or verify outreach from Ivan by emailing im@ivanmehta.com or via encrypted message at ivan.42 on Signal.
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
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