[HN Gopher] Show HN: Snipd - AI podcast player to highlight and ...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Snipd - AI podcast player to highlight and take notes with
transcripts
Author : KevinBenSmith
Score : 52 points
Date : 2022-02-24 13:52 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.snipd.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.snipd.com)
| syserror wrote:
| Wow! I'm working on something exactly like this as a personal
| project!
|
| 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
| KevinBenSmith wrote:
| Cool! That's great. I think there's so much still to do in the
| space of AI for spoken audio. Be it podcasts, audio books,
| video calls or similar. So definitely keep at it. I hope you
| understand that I can't reveal all of our tricks. But what I
| can say is that it definitely helped us to think about what we
| as humans use as input for our processing in these situations.
| So it's not just text. The audio has value as well. To see this
| you can do a small experiment by just looking at the transcript
| manually and then trying to find optimal segmentation points.
| It's difficult. Dynamic ad insertion is also still a challenge
| for us. We'd like to develop a technical solution for it but
| haven't found the time to tackle it yet.
| causi wrote:
| Could this be extended to include podcast ad-skipping? Being able
| to define A-B points and adding that to a blocklist would be
| amazing. I have several podcasts I've essentially stopped
| listening to because they're so consumed by ads.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| There are already tools for that. Still, might I suggest just
| skipping manually yourself or paying for ad free access?
| Creators need to be reimbursed for their efforts, otherwise
| we'll only be left with those rich enough to do it free or
| increasingly subtle 'native' ads.
|
| (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.)
| KevinBenSmith wrote:
| I completely get that. See my comment above why we decided
| against having a dedicated feature for this. I'm hoping that
| tipping (or similar forms) will get more popular in the
| future and be supported by more podcast creators in their RSS
| feed.
| KevinBenSmith wrote:
| We thought about that and actually decided against a dedicated
| feature doing exactly this. The reason being that we do not
| want to hurt podcaster's ability to monetize their content.
| That being said, with the automatically generated chapters in
| our app, you do already get a good sense of where the ads are.
|
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| I had not heard about that, but I'm glad for it. I listen to
| a lot of podcasts, and I try to throw money at them, in a
| somewhat haphazard way. I'd do it a lot more consistently if
| I could just push a button in the app.
|
| 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...)
| KevinBenSmith wrote:
| Haha, I know what you mean. I think almost everyone skips
| the ads to a certain extent. But you still end up hearing
| about them at some point. Some of my favorite podcasts are
| Lex Fridman, Tim Ferris and Andrew Huberman. So there is no
| way around hearing some "Athletic Greens" ads. And after a
| while, I actually bought some :D
|
| Great to hear your feedback regarding tipping. Maybe we
| should prioritize this feature.
| jfengel wrote:
| I'll admit, I'm very fond of PocketCasts, so it'll take
| rather a lot to get me to switch. But tipping is a
| feature I'd consider it for.
| KevinBenSmith wrote:
| Ok, I added a vote to this feature for you in our
| internal feature request tracking ;) What do you love
| about PocketCasts the most?
| lcfcjs wrote:
| sunsetMurk wrote:
| neat! I'm going to try it. I wonder if I can import my
| subscriptions from Castro? And, I wonder if there is anything
| similar to the queue feature to always have a custom-curated list
| of fresh episodes to listen to.
|
| 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.
|
| 1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzPekGpC4uw
| KevinBenSmith wrote:
| Haha, note-taken. This was our first public video and we just
| recorded it ourselves. Lot of potential for improvement :D
|
| 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.
| derwiki wrote:
| Name sounds familiar, wasn't there a YC company around 2008 with
| this name?
|
| Edit: https://techcrunch.com/2008/10/30/y-combinators-snipd-
| launch...
| KevinBenSmith wrote:
| Yes, there was! And there are even some similarities. My
| understanding is that they focused on collecting valuable pages
| from the web. In comparison, we are focused on collecting
| valuable moments from podcasts :)
| codq wrote:
| Been using it for a while, it's very cool.
|
| 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!
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Can explain how it works from a user perspective? The website
| is slim on details. It just has one sentence explaining what it
| does. I don't want to install it to find out.
|
| EDIT: I guess the Apple App Store description has the info I
| wanted
| KevinBenSmith wrote:
| Yes, we definitely need to add more info on the homepage. The
| best way to get an overview of how it works & feels like as a
| user is this youtube video here, which we created for our PH
| launch today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzPekGpC4uw
|
| Let me know if you have any specific questions. Happy to
| answer :)
| KevinBenSmith wrote:
| Cool! Nice to hear that you're already using it :) I'll add
| your vote to the apple watch app request. We do have it on the
| longer term roadmap. But given that we are still early, we are
| trying to focus our energy as much as possible on the mobile
| experience to make sure we get that part right before we branch
| out. After that, we'd like to build a car, smart watch and web-
| app version (not necessarily in that order).
| leobg wrote:
| Awesome.
|
| 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.).
| KevinBenSmith wrote:
| Given how early we still are we first want to focus on podcasts
| and make sure we nail the functionality & experience. In the
| future, we then want to enable users to also upload their own
| audio content (e.g. an audio book) and benefit from all of the
| same features.
|
| 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.
| leobg wrote:
| Gotcha. No, if you have plans to focus on audio, then, by all
| means, don't let yourself get sidetracked. For text content,
| I already am using Voice Dream Reader, which, in my mind, is
| the best there is. Being able to study both text and audio
| content in the same app and with the same workflow for
| highlights would just be the icing on the cake.
|
| 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.
| KevinBenSmith wrote:
| Thx! With the highlighting, one of our main goals is to
| make it as easy as possible. At least for me personally, if
| it's not easy to do, I won't do it. Mainly because I am
| often on the go when listening to podcasts. And thx to AI,
| this is now much more possible.
| leobg wrote:
| Exactly. For me, if it's not easy to record a highlight,
| I will stop reading in that situation for fear of missing
| something important that I'd want to get back to later.
| Hence one tap highlighting lets me "read" where I
| normally couldn't.
| jono_wilson wrote:
| This looks really cool! Can't wait to try it when I'm listening
| to podcasts on my walk; are you using a paid API for the
| transcript or are you using an open source solution yourselves?
| ferdinand_snipd wrote:
| Thanks! Let us know how you like it! We don't use any paid APIs
| for the AI. Everything is in-house ;)
| agentdrtran wrote:
| any word on snipping coming to private RSS feeds? all of my most
| listened to pods are private
| KevinBenSmith wrote:
| We don't have a clear date yet when we will tackle it, but it
| will definitely come. And the more users request it, the sooner
| it will come. So I'll add your vot to this request ;) Are your
| private feeds all podcasts or also some other content?
| MattyMatt wrote:
| Looks awesome! As a podcast aficionado I will definitely give it
| a try! Well done :-)
| ferdinand_snipd wrote:
| Thanks! Would be great to hear how you like it!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-02-24 23:01 UTC)