PRODUCT STUDIOEarshot
Every episode, minus the parts you skip anyway.
A podcast player for iPhone and for the browser. A transcript for every episode, ad spans found on the device and drawn right on the timeline, and a playback position that picks up exactly where you left off, on whichever device you left it.
- Surfaces
- iPhone and web
- Transcripts
- Every episode
- Ads
- Off, detect, skip or quiet, per show
- Domain
- earshot.fm
What it does
The player, with its ears open
- Transcripts for everything. Read along, tap any line to jump the audio there, and search what was actually said instead of scrubbing for the bit you half remember.
- Ad spans, mapped. Ads are detected on the device and marked on the timeline. Skip them in one tap, quiet them, or let them play. A show you love keeps its ads if that is what you want.
- Positions that follow you. Pause on your phone in the car, resume in the browser at your desk. The position is the app’s most protected piece of state, and it is the one thing every other player gets subtly wrong.
- Triage and browse, both. A Castro-style inbox for the shows you sort through, and an ordinary library for the shows you binge. You should not have to pick a personality.
- Silence trimming and loudness normalization. Two hosts recorded in two different rooms come out sounding like one show, at one volume, at whatever speed you like.
- No ads of its own. An app built around skipping ads that then sold you its own would be a strange thing to trust.
Why it exists
Beautiful or capable, pick one
The podcast category splits cleanly. There are players that are lovely to look at and thin underneath, and players that will do anything you ask if you can find the setting. Almost nobody does both, and the two halves have been stable for a decade.
Earshot is the attempt at both, and the transcript is the reason it can be. Once every episode has a transcript, a pile of hard problems become easy ones: finding the moment someone said the thing, knowing where an ad starts and stops, searching a show instead of remembering it. The work is real, so it runs on a server once per show rather than on every listener’s phone.
The rest is the boring discipline: position sync that does not lose your place, downloads that are as good as streams, and a car experience built for someone whose hands are on a wheel.
Early access
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