11 ms·

Show HN: Snipd – AI podcast player to highlight and take notes with transcripts

73 points by KevinBenSmith 5y ago

sunsetMurk 5y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzPekGpC4uw
- KevinBenSmith 5y ago
  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.
- gina_schalala 5y ago
  Sorry, that'd be me! Hope it didn't distract from the actual content of the video too much. We'll work on better audio for our future videos.
derwiki 5y ago
Name sounds familiar, wasn’t there a YC company around 2008 with this name? Edit: https://techcrunch.com/2008/10/30/y-combinators-snipd-launches-to-the-public/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/10/30/y-combinators-snipd-launch...
- KevinBenSmith 5y ago
  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 :)
leobg 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
codq 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzPekGpC4uw Let me know if you have any specific questions. Happy to answer :)
- KevinBenSmith 5y ago
  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).
causi 5y ago
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.
- lcfcjs 5y ago
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
jono_wilson 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Thanks! Let us know how you like it! We don't use any paid APIs for the AI. Everything is in-house ;)
agentdrtran 5y ago
any word on snipping coming to private RSS feeds? all of my most listened to pods are private
- KevinBenSmith 5y ago
  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?
  - agentdrtran 5y ago
    All podcasts, all from patreon/acast even I think
MattyMatt 5y ago
Looks awesome! As a podcast aficionado I will definitely give it a try! Well done :-)
- ferdinand_snipd 5y ago
  Thanks! Would be great to hear how you like it!
syserror 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
applgo443 5y ago
Thanks for this! But are you sure this is not copyright infringement?
- KevinBenSmith 5y ago
  Just like all other podcast apps, we are relying on the RSS feed system and are not streaming any audio from our own servers. The podcasts are streamed directly from the podcast hosters via the URLs provided by podcasters in their RSS feeds.
nmm 5y ago
Looks great! I’ll probably use it just for the chapters alone. Huberman lab only has “clickable” YouTube but I find I end up getting distracted while I’m on there. This is way better. Unrelated: I noticed you’re not using the App Store banner on your landing page. Why is that? Difficulty tracking conversions?

73 points by KevinBenSmith 5y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzPekGpC4uw

KevinBenSmith 5y ago
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.
gina_schalala 5y ago
Sorry, that'd be me! Hope it didn't distract from the actual content of the video too much. We'll work on better audio for our future videos.

derwiki 5y ago

Name sounds familiar, wasn’t there a YC company around 2008 with this name? Edit: https://techcrunch.com/2008/10/30/y-combinators-snipd-launches-to-the-public/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/10/30/y-combinators-snipd-launch...

KevinBenSmith 5y ago
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 :)

leobg 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago

codq 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzPekGpC4uw Let me know if you have any specific questions. Happy to answer :)
KevinBenSmith 5y ago
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).

causi 5y ago

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.

lcfcjs 5y ago
paulryanrogers 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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 5y ago

jono_wilson 5y ago

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 5y ago
Thanks! Let us know how you like it! We don't use any paid APIs for the AI. Everything is in-house ;)

agentdrtran 5y ago

any word on snipping coming to private RSS feeds? all of my most listened to pods are private

KevinBenSmith 5y ago
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?
- agentdrtran 5y ago
  All podcasts, all from patreon/acast even I think

MattyMatt 5y ago

Looks awesome! As a podcast aficionado I will definitely give it a try! Well done :-)

ferdinand_snipd 5y ago
Thanks! Would be great to hear how you like it!

syserror 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.

applgo443 5y ago

Thanks for this! But are you sure this is not copyright infringement?

KevinBenSmith 5y ago
Just like all other podcast apps, we are relying on the RSS feed system and are not streaming any audio from our own servers. The podcasts are streamed directly from the podcast hosters via the URLs provided by podcasters in their RSS feeds.

nmm 5y ago

Looks great! I’ll probably use it just for the chapters alone. Huberman lab only has “clickable” YouTube but I find I end up getting distracted while I’m on there. This is way better. Unrelated: I noticed you’re not using the App Store banner on your landing page. Why is that? Difficulty tracking conversions?