Founded by Stéphane Dadian (CentraleSupélec) and Rafi Haladjian, serial entrepreneur and Tech expert, Juice will revolutionize the way we consume podcasts, music and news. This application allows you to define what you want to listen to and discover content likely to interest you for an interactive and 100% personalized experience. Its co-founder, Stéphane Dadian, tells us more.
The journey of Stéphane Dadian, founder of Juice
Can you tell us a little more about your background?
I have an engineering background. I did my prep at Stan, then I joined Centrale Nantes. I was able to start discovering everything that revolved around AI, before specializing in NLP [Natural Language Processing, NDLR]. After Centrale, I continued my studies with a master’s degree at the University of Michigan where I continued to specialize in NLP and VoiceTech.
I then wanted to discover the business world. I went to Silicon Valley, to Menlo Park, to work for two years in a startup specializing in NLP. It was a B2B structure which collaborated with large companies such as banks and insurance companies. We analyzed customer service conversations. I learned a lot and I was also able to meet French people who gave me a lot and helped me in the development of Juice, like Louis Monnier, founder of AltaVista.
For his part, Rafi is a serial entrepreneur. He was the founder of Francenet, the first internet service provider in France. He was a pioneer in IoT with Nabaztag, the connected rabbit.
What made you give up everything to take the plunge into entrepreneurship?
I always had this idea in mind. I come from a family of entrepreneurs. I didn’t think I would get started so soon, but I was very attracted to this universe. This is why I preferred to go to startups rather than large companies, to understand this dimension. My meeting with Rafi catalyzed this. He was the one who accelerated things and made me want to return to France to set up Juice, a 100% French company.
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Everything you need to know about Juice, its origins and how it works
How did you come up with the idea for Juice?
In speaking with Rafi in 2018, we drew the same observation about audio content: there is a craze and an explosion of podcasts and wireless headphones, even though this format has not changed in twenty years. Little by little, our thoughts led to the creation of Juice.
Juice, what is it?
Juice is a product that wants to invent the audio format of tomorrow. For 20 years, we have always had the same podcast distribution platforms where we have to go and find the podcasts. Once you have finished listening, you have to go back to your library to find another program to listen to… The idea is to bring the audio up to date.
Thus, Juice aims to be a personalized and interactive audio platform. It’s an audio companion that will aggregate, in a single and personalized feed, real-time news, interesting podcasts and the music that people like or discover. We started adding services based on synthetic voice. We offer a weather report, based on my location, a calendar view, a talking clock, etc. Personalized services of this type.
How does Juice work?
This flow is always generated for me, here and now, while being interactive. You can interact with audio at any time. If I’m listening to a news story, I can ask to know more. If I want to skip a podcast, I can do that. The algorithm will understand that we no longer want to listen to this type of content. Everything is controlled by voice.
Today, our generation likes to read less and has to deal with an explosion of information. We don’t want to spend time looking at outdated information. Juice offers a service that allows you to have the top news by highlighting the hottest topics of the last few hours. Information is announced by robot voices as well as human voices. We work with around twenty robot voices that we personalize with names and characters. They present the news and services such as the weather. Our goal is to make it enjoyable to listen to.
The news is processed by our news engine, an algorithm which does all the work of understanding and analyzing the articles. It sorts them and gathers the data before transforming it into audio format. He will read tens of thousands of articles per day.
For music, Juice connects to users’ streaming services. We use their music rights. For podcasts, we collect content whose format is quite short.
Juice today
How do you finance yourself?
Today, we don’t have any revenue yet because we haven’t launched our model. The objective is to offer an application with advertising or with a subscription allowing you to free yourself from advertisements. Today we are self-funded and have received grants.
Before implementing our business model and communicating, our goal was to understand users and how they use the application. Juice must be perfect. This launch will arrive later, during 2022.
Where is your application today?
Today, in terms of user volume, we are around the first tens of thousands of users. What interests us is the retention rate, a figure which has increased significantly. As a general rule, an active user will come three days a week to the platform on Juice. Currently, 10% of them are actively using our app. Our listening averages are also increasing.
The future of the application by Stéphane Dadian
Can you imagine a solution similar to Juice for video?
In the short term, we believe that audio is the opportunity of the moment. Screen time is saturated. While audio is not yet an exploited territory. The advantage of audio is that users can do other things at the same time. There is a lot to do on this subject before launching into other areas such as VR.
How do you imagine Juice in the future?
Our first work is on the advertising that will be implemented on Juice. We don’t want to do what is proposed on the radio. We want to make it more pleasant, less intrusive through our robot influencers, who know the users and contextualize the advertising.
We also have lots of ideas for evolving Juice, starting with diversifying audio sources. We will perhaps take an interest in social networks and offer, why not, users to create their audio format on Juice. Before that, we must have a great, entertaining and interesting platform. This is what we are arriving at very soon.
