Show HN: Podsee – AI tool for podcast listeners

Show HN: Podsee – AI tool for podcast listeners(pods.ee)

16 points by gonglexin 2 years ago | 21 comments

Hi everyone, I just launched Podsee(https://pods.ee) for podcast listeners, lovers. You can search and listen to podcasts at Podsee. What makes it different is that you can get the AI transcript for an episode.

It started as a side project after I resigned my job one year ago. As a programmer, I love Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org/) and Phoenix LiveView(https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view), and want to make a product with it. So I build Podsee.

I'm planning to add more AI features to it, like summarize the episode audio, episode to comics, etc.

I'd love to invite you all to try out the product and would appreciate hearing your feedback! Thanks!

snissn 2 years ago |

I’d personally love to get help finding podcasts to listen to. Given a user listening to xyz podcasts show that abc are similar. Or just for each podcast show similar ones with some kind of general explore feature

gonglexin 2 years ago | |

good suggestion

astroid 2 years ago |

I am guessing you are already on top of this, but just in case I wanted to suggest that you aim for Podcasting 2.0 compatibility:

https://podnews.net/podcast/i4ji5 https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/blob/m... https://podcastindex.org/

Also I tried searching for my top 5 podcasts, and none of them came up which was disappointing. Neat idea though.

astroid 2 years ago | |

One more link I forgot: https://api.podcastindex.org/signup

I am unaffiliated, I just like what they are doing.

gonglexin 2 years ago | |

Could you please list those podcast names, I'll have a look.

jamescridland 2 years ago |

There are transcripts in some podcasts. Try looking at the RSS feed for Podnews Daily - in your service as https://pods.ee/261 (look at today's, Oct 19, since there was a bug generating the SRT/TXT versions recently).

You'll find transcripts for some shows in SRT format, and some have JSON and TXT as well.

Use those transcripts if they exist, I reckon!

Also, check podcastindex.org for an alternative search API; and join podcastindex.social to learn more about the various tools.

gonglexin 2 years ago | |

OK, good advice. I will take a look at it.

CygnusX-1 2 years ago |

Congrats on shipping! I like the uncluttered format.

When there are no search results (e.g. "finance"), the result is a blank screen instead of something like "no podcasts found, try another search". The other thing is, search seems to be based on the podcast title/description instead of individual podcasts.

I'm new to podcasts, so pardon this question - is it possible to use the "scroll bar" to fast-forward? I use this quite a bit on Youtube. Also, is it possible to change the playback speed?

gonglexin 2 years ago | |

Thanks for your valuable feedback! I'm going to fix it.

akuji1993 2 years ago |

The search seems to be very overwhelmed by traffic. I tried to find my own podcast "Code & Conquer - The Indie Hacker Podcast" but it doesn't show up. Or it showed up once, but I couldn't interact with the element? Not sure what I'm supposed to do after it found the podcast I'm looking for. The + button doesn't do anything.

gonglexin 2 years ago | |

Sorry for the UI misunderstanding, Your podcast is here https://pods.ee/260

atmosx 2 years ago |

Congratulations on the launch. I like the general look and feel. Is your system to perform transcript and digitisation in languages other than English?

I have a Greek podcast that I'd like to generate transcripts. I tried google but results were bellow average. Whisper is awesome in performing the transcript but lacks digitisation - should be _easy_ because in my case it's just two speakers.

gonglexin 2 years ago | |

I'm currently focus on English, but would love to support other languages in the near future. May I have the link of that Greek podcast, I can have a look at it.

atmosx 2 years ago | | |

Here is the link: https://timis-eneken.github.io/

I uploaded just a few episodes, there are many more from years past and the show is still ongoing. I stopped uploading episodes to solve the transcription problem programmatically but got stuck then "life" happened. I'd gladly pay for a service that can do that reliably for me though.

ps. In case you hit new ground, please drop an email :-)

bayshark 2 years ago |

Congrats on launch! I like how simple the layout is and you can get right to value. Any difference between an AI transcript and a transcript provided by the show itself or something like PodScripts? Also, I see the red icon next to pod eps does that indicate an AI transcript was created for this ep and not others?

gonglexin 2 years ago | |

Sorry, I know nothing about PodScripts. For the AI transcript, we do a speech recognition and turn the whole audio to the text. AFAIK, podcast owner often provide show notes, not the whole text version for their show.

And your are right, the red icon indicate that the episode has already been transcribed by AI, you can see the text version of it.

astroid 2 years ago | | |

I mentioned this in another comment, but I think it bears repeating since you mentioned "FAIK, podcast owner often provide show notes, not the whole text version for their show." -- take a look at the podcasting 2.0 specs, they absolutely do provide transcripts to whole shows.

It's an open source standard which includes transcripts, chapter art, and a bunch of other added functionality which is being driven by Adam Currey, who is known for the original creation of podcasting, was an MTV VJ who ran mtv.com before MTV realized there was value there, and now hosts the No Agenda podcast.

I have a feeling you will find some value in the standards, given that the transcript format/metadata is already established.

https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/tree/m...

https://podnews.net/podcast/i4ji5

smcleod 2 years ago |

Doesn’t seem to have any of the podcasts I listen to on it - all of which are very popular. The skeptics guide to the universe, no such thing as a fish to name a few.

gonglexin 2 years ago | |

Sorry for that, we have two kinds of search, one for existing podcasts in Podsee, one for search internet. You may searched the existing data.

The skeptics guide to the universe: https://pods.ee/283 no such thing as a fish: https://pods.ee/280

smcleod 2 years ago | | |

Ahhh, I see - yeah that was quite confusing. Great to see them on there!