I personally am hoping that some of the podcasting 2.0 features will make it easy for listeners to tip podcasters directly. Once we have that, we could implement an ad-skipping feature which is then only activated for listeners who have tipped the podcast creator.
Being able to skip the ads would be a nice bonus, though I'll admit that I use the existing features to skip ad breaks extensively. (I still end up hearing enough that I'm familiar with the products, and even try to patronize them. In fact, I need some new socks...)
(Full disclosure, I work for a service that helps monitize ad free feeds. Opinions are my own, don't reflect my employer, and obviously I'm biased.)
I'd love an Apple Watch app, as a lot of my post-fatherhood podcast time is on the rare occasions I'm able to get out for a run.
But in general, Snipd takes a good crack at solving a major problem—annotating and taking notes while listening to a podcast on-the-go. I'm a fan!
EDIT: I guess the Apple App Store description has the info I wanted
Let me know if you have any specific questions. Happy to answer :)
Any plans to go beyond podcasts? I'd like to import any EPUB, PDF or TXT document, have it read to me by text-to-speech, and then have all the features you currently have for podcasts (i.e. reading along on the screen, one-tap highlights, etc.).
For now, we haven't really thought about enabling text mediums and going the other way around (text to speech instead of speech to text). You could however check out the Matter app. Not sure whether you can upload your own pdfs, but you can do text-to-speech for blog posts, including highlighting. They also have a Readwise integration like us.
And I really like your one-tap highlight functionality (or triple clicking the headphone buttons). Very useful when driving or when the phone is tucked away and you're listening via headphones.
My only feedback before downloading... the video demo[1] (ironically for a podcast app>) has an unpleasant voiceover, the woman needs a drink of water! Content-wise it's great but I was distracted by the almost ASMR-like experience of feeling like she was very close to my ear, and I didn't like it.
Regarding your questions: Yes, you can import your subscriptions from Castro via OPML. We have a How-To in the app for how to do this specifically for Castro.
The queue & inbox system is still missing, but very high on our roadmap. We're actually working on the queue right now. With the inbox, our plan is to go in a similar direction as Castro has done it.
Let me know if you have any more thoughts on the queue/inbox system.
I have a few questions about how you're doing time segmentation.
Are you using a purely text based approach? as in your pipeline looks like STT -> some BERT based model for segmentation/summary?
or are you using a text + audio model to get extra signal?
Have you found any cool tricks (pre-processing/heuristics) that really improved your approach?
How are you dealing with ad placement insertion that can have different times for different users? For example user A might have a 30 second ad inserted and user B might have two ads inserted for a total of 60 seconds. That would shift all your times at a user specific level. Or are you serving the podcasts from your own server?
My project goal is slightly different than yours in that my goal is almost entirely automatically skipping ads until I am able to just pay a subscription fee to the podcasters to support their content.
Awesome app! Super exciting to see folks working on this
Edit: https://techcrunch.com/2008/10/30/y-combinators-snipd-launch...
Unrelated: I noticed you’re not using the App Store banner on your landing page. Why is that? Difficulty tracking conversions?
