8-second attention span

Remember when you could sit through a one-hour vlog? Those were the good days.

Many of us now look for more ways to skim content and find shorter alternatives, either because of time or the inability to focus for that long. The numbers don’t lie either — Gen Z’s attention span is 8 seconds, compared to a millennial’s 12 seconds. 😬

While working as a software engineer at Amazon, maker Marin Smiljanic noticed it was increasingly difficult to sit through hours of training videos and even harder to find the exact moments when a topic was covered. That inspired the creation of Omnisearch, a tool that uses context-aware AI to find anything inside your audio, video, image, and word files.

With his co-founder, Matej Ferencevic, Smiljanic built on the 2021 release of Omnisearch with more limited search ability. Today’s version lets you find both spoken and visual mention of an object; if you search ‘banana,’ you’ll find video frames where the word is spoken and frames containing an actual banana. It can also search for people and characters within images and videos.

The Omnisearch API lets makers integrate Omnisearch into their websites or apps, which enables users to skim through various types of content. Smiljanic and Ferencevic target makers of online learning services, citing the low attention spans of students and the difficulty of searching for a topic within a lecture as reasons why Omnisearch could grow their user base.

As attention spans get shorter and schedules get busier, could tools like Omnisearch become an important part of website and product building? If you made it this far, let the makers know how you feel in the comments.

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