Spotify rival Anghami doubles down on artificial intelligence with AI-powered podcast and newsroom

Anghami, the Middle East and North Africa region’s challenger to Spotify, is sharpening its focus on artificial intelligence with the upcoming launch of its AI-Powered Personalized Podcast and AI Newsroom.

The company says its AI-Powered Personalized Podcast is “the first of its kind in the world.”

The feature will allow users to create and customize their own personalized podcast by selecting topics, voices, and languages including English, Arabic and French. Topics range from local, global news, to music, sports, technology, business, and more.

Anghami’s AI then creates a podcast that is tailored to the creators’ interests, providing a unique experience.

“We are excited to introduce this cutting-edge feature enabling users to personalize their daily content and curate a unique audio journey. This is a testament to our ongoing commitment to innovation and delivering exceptional user experiences,” said Anghami co-founder Elie Habib.

“We are excited to introduce this cutting-edge feature enabling users to personalize their daily content and curate a unique audio journey. This is a testament to our ongoing commitment to innovation and delivering exceptional user experiences.”

Elie Habib, Anghami

Complementing the new AI-powered feature, Anghami launched on May 4 its first ever daily news podcast, Anghami AI Newsroom, that is generated solely by artificial intelligence.

The AI Newsroom is a daily podcast that is solely produced by AI without human intervention, said Anghami.

This podcast autonomously researches and curates topics, delivers concise summaries and records content in multiple languages. The AI generates fresh episodes every morning, recapping the news from the previous day. Additionally, Anghami is using its existing algorithms that detect popular and emerging songs, feeding that information to the AI system to generate a music news segment that offers listeners the latest updates in the music industry.

Habib added: “Our use of AI technology allows us to deliver accurate news updates in multiple languages tailored to our audience. This is a significant milestone for Anghami and the audio streaming industry in the MENA region.”

The AI Newsroom is powered by OpenAI’s GPT models, which uses a wide range of trusted sources from both regional and international outlets.

Anghami’s new ventures demonstrate the potential of AI in generating audio content. The move also comes as Anghami aims to become the first platform to host more than 200,000 songs generated by AI.

Back in December, the company said it partnered with a generative music platform called Mubert, allowing users to create “unique soundtracks” for various uses such as social media, presentations or films using one million samples from over 4,000 musicians.

Aside from Anghami, China’s largest music streaming company, Tencent Music Entertainment, also produces tracks generated by AI.

TME in November said it had created and released over 1,000 tracks containing vocals created by AI tech that mimics the human voice, and one of those tracks has already topped 100 million streams at the time.

For Anghami, its new AI ventures could help the company further grow its subscriber base.

In 2022, its number of total paying subscribers rose 21% year over year to 1.52 million. The company generated $48.1 million in revenues last year, up 35.6% from 2021.

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