AI News App Targets Finance Executives Who Don't Have Time for Full Podcasts
Particle, an AI-powered news aggregator built by former Twitter engineers, launched a feature this week that extracts relevant clips from podcasts and surfaces them alongside written news stories—a move that acknowledges what every CFO already knows: nobody has time to listen to three-hour podcast episodes to catch the one minute where the CEO actually says something newsworthy.
The feature, called Podcast Clips, debuted just before the company's Android release and uses embedding models to identify when podcast segments relate to breaking news stories. Users can either play the audio clip or read a highlighted transcript as the words are spoken, turning what might have been a 45-second needle in a three-hour haystack into something you can consume while waiting for your next meeting to start.
"We've done that basically for any news story—if there is a podcast that is talking about it, or relevant at all, we've got all those clips," Particle CEO Sara Beykpour, previously Senior Director of Product Management at Twitter, told TechCrunch. The company now integrates these clips directly into its news feed, positioning them as commentary alongside traditional written coverage.
The timing reflects a broader shift in how corporate news breaks. As Bloomberg reported in 2024, tech CEOs increasingly bypass traditional media in favor of "friendly podcast hosts" to air talking points—a trend that's made podcasts less of a leisure medium and more of a required monitoring channel for anyone tracking corporate strategy. When a CEO announces a major pivot or acquisition on a podcast instead of through a press release, finance teams either need to listen or risk being caught flat-footed.
Beykpour emphasized that Particle uses embedding models rather than generative AI for this feature. The distinction matters: embedding models identify relationships between content without inventing new text, which theoretically reduces the risk of hallucinated quotes or misattributed statements—though the company didn't provide specifics on accuracy rates or error handling.
The broader question is whether this solves a real problem or just creates a new one. On one hand, surfacing a 45-second clip where a CEO discusses restructuring plans is genuinely useful. On the other hand, context matters—and a clip divorced from the surrounding conversation could miss crucial nuance. (Then again, most people weren't listening to the full episode anyway, so perhaps that's not a loss.)
What's clear is that Particle is betting on a future where news consumption looks less like reading articles and more like assembling information from multiple formats simultaneously. Whether that future appeals to finance executives who already feel buried in information streams is the real test. The app is now available on both iOS and Android.
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