After having sold at Spotify, the co-founders of Anchor are back with Oboe, an application fueled by AI

The co-founders who sold their latest startup anchor at Spotify launch their next project: Oboe, an educational application fueled by AI which allows anyone to create light and flexible learning lessons on almost all the subjects they choose, simply by entering an invite.

These courses can extend over a variety of verticals, including subjects such as science, history, foreign language, news, pop culture, preparation of life changes, etc. At the launch, Oboe – a name inspired by the root of the Japanese word meaning “learning” – will offer nine different lessons formats. These allow users to learn how they prefer, explained the co-founder of Nir Zicherman Cotes in Techcrunch.

Zicherman founded the company with the co-founder of the Michael Mignano anchor after leaving Spotify in October 2023 and took a brief period to recharge. Zicherman said that he had been inspired to work on an AI educational product after working to evolve the audio books activities of Spotify, which allowed people to more easily access high quality and educational content, as it was grouped together with their musical subscription.

Unlike the AI ​​chatbots, you don’t have to engage in back and forth conversations to learn with an oboe. Instead, you can opt for text and visuals, audio lessons, games, interactive tests, etc.

For those who want to learn on the go, Oboe offers two audio formats. One is more like listening to a university style conference, while the other is similar to the Google LM Podcast type notebook, because it presents two hosts speaking in depth of the subject.

“The real magic here comes from an internal architecture that we have built that I would describe as a complex and multi-agent architecture that we have built from zero, each part of which is orchestrated to operate in parallel while we generate a course,” explains Zicherman.

“The challenge is, how do you create lessons that are both high quality, entirely personalized to what the user wants to see, and also generated very quickly? All this happens in seconds,” he said.

“We have agents who, in parallel, are responsible for everything, for the development of the architecture of the course to the development and verification of the basic equipment which is taught, by writing the script of the podcast, by drawing real images of the Internet-not images generated by AI, but real images and visuals in the reading formats that we offer,” he added.

Some OBOE agents audit the content to ensure that the courses are accurate, high quality and personalized to what the user wants to learn.

The courses themselves are supposed to be light, engaging and even fun. In addition, the Oboe team works on a recommendation engine that will help you go further on a subject, if you prefer. This leaves the user to know if they want to acquire knowledge at the surface level on a new subject or if they want to be more deepened.

This, combined with the variety of formats, will help oboe to appear to a wider audience, estimates the team.

“For me, education evokes images of more formal academic parameters and the types of normative programs to which students are used to growing up,” Zicherman told Techcrunch. “But the truth is that we are all lifetime learners … So long as we spend on the internet these days are devoted to better understanding things, but the truth is that the Internet has been designed to attract our attention, not to teach effectively.”

“We are very happy to build a platform which is intended to be the one-stop shop to serve this intrinsic thirst for the knowledge that exists in each person,” he said.

At launch, users can consume any course created by others for free and can create up to five free lessons per month. After that, there are two paid levels: Obooes Plus, which offers 30 additional lessons for $ 15 per month, and Coefoe Pro, which offers 100 courses for $ 40 per month.

The service will first be available on the web (and the mobile web), but the native applications for iOS and Android are on the way.

Oboe is a team of five full -time, including Zicherman. Mignano remains a full-time partner of the company VC Lightspeed, but sits on the administration of Oboe and shares the title of co-founder.

The 4 million dollar seeds of the startup was led by Eniac Ventures, the VC company which led the anchoring seeds. La Ronde also includes investments by Haystack, Factorial Capital, Homebrew, Offline Ventures, Scott Belsky, Kayvon Beykpour, Nikita Bier, Tim Ferriss and Matt Lieber.