Nir Zicherman and Michael Mignano, the co-founders of Anchor, are having one hell of a second act on the tech stage. They recently released their innovative new educational app, Oboe, and it’s already turning heads! After a short break following their departure from Spotify, it enables learners to develop engaging and agile learning experiences on just about any subject.
What makes Oboe unique, though, is its ability to let users generate entire courses just by typing a prompt. The app adapts to your personal learning style. She produces a wide range of audio formats from more traditional university-style lectures to much more interactive and engaging podcast-like material. At its launch, Oboe will feature nine different course formats aimed at making the learning experience engaging and even enjoyable.
During its first phase, Oboe will be accessible via the web and mobile web. I’m excited to announce you can look forward to native applications for iOS and Android! Users are free to browse hundreds of other user-generated courses and unlock them for free. They’re allowed to produce five free courses a month! For those seeking additional access, Oboe offers two paid tiers: Oboe Plus for $15 per month, which includes 30 additional courses, and Oboe Pro for $40 per month, allowing for access to 100 courses.
Zicherman and Mignano have assembled a small, focused, passionate team. This group is made up of five full-time members primarily charged with stewarding the platform. Mignano still finds plentiful success as a partner at venture firm Lightspeed Ventures. He continues to be active at Oboe, playing the role of board member and co-founder.
Zicherman emphasized the advanced technology behind Oboe, stating, “The real magic here comes from an internal architecture that we’ve built that I would describe as a complex, multi-agent architecture that we built from scratch, each part of which is orchestrated to run in parallel as we generate a course.” This complex, comprehensive, detailed blueprint creates a framework for swift quality course development and deployment.
The primary intention of the app is to address the need for creating courses that are both personalized and rapidly created. Zicherman explained, “The challenge is, how do you create courses that are both high quality, entirely personalized to what the user wants to see, and get generated extremely quickly? This all happens within seconds.”
To protect for accuracy and quality, many of Oboe’s agents overlook the content that Oboe generates. They plan the outline of the course and check teaching aids. They script out all of their audio content and source actual images from the web rather than exclusively producing visual content through AI.
“The challenge is to create a platform that serves the intrinsic thirst for knowledge that exists in every person,” Zicherman added. He argues that education must be liberated from the confines of conventional classrooms. One of his main goals is to make learning more hands on and exciting.
Oboe raised $4 million in its first round of funding. This round was led by Eniac Ventures—the same venture capital firm that initially funded Anchor when it got started. The name “Oboe” takes its cue from the Japanese word that translates to “to learn.” This decision is just so on-brand with the app’s overall mission at its heart: to empower users with knowledge.