For all the furore around LLMs and GenAI, one of the less obvious benefits in this next wave of tech is the rise in smaller, innovative AI-powered apps.
One such is Blinkist, a cool little app that takes a simple idea and really nails the execution, and, with the help of AI, escalates interactive ‘reading’ to the next level.
Their raisin d’être is simple, but from a product perspective very interesting. Audiobooks, while a hugely popular ‘enhanced’ version of consuming books, also, by proxy, solve a lot of big issue of traditional literature. You can listen to them in the car, or wherever you might be, and still have your hands free for driving, or whatever other task you are doing.
But one ‘problem’ still exists with audiobooks, especially for those short on time – they are by their nature lengthy. This might be fine for a novel you want to emerge yourself in, but for factual books of which you want to simply learn from and consume, it represents an area of potential improvement.
Blinkist tackles this in a simple way. Focussing on the learning genres (including self-help, creativity, design, management, lifestyle, and health), the app summarises full length books and their ‘key insights’ – some down to as little as 15 minutes – using AI to streamline the process.
Even the most avid reader isn’t going to tackle hundreds of personal growth books in a year, but you could easily listen to one summarised daily. That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing since last November, and I’d thoroughly recommend it.
Like any product, there’s still areas to improve: the voice technology they are using isn’t quite their yet (although this is rapidly improving elsewhere in the industry quicker than you can imagine); and they seem to be missing a trick by not having an option to buy a purchase and listen to a full audiobook version within the app.
There’s also a Pro plan that verges on something closer to NotebookLM, summarising anything you can throw at it – not just books, but (articles, podcasts, videos, PDFs etc) – which I’m looking forward to trying.
I picked up the Premium plan (full access to all books + Pro for free) on the Black Friday sale, which at £15.99 was a no-brainer. The full price is a bit steeper, but they do offer one free ‘Blink’ per day, which is a great way of trying it out. They are really varied – so much so I still subscribe to the daily notification for them to broaden my learning.