PRODUCT STUDIOEarshot
Every episode, minus the parts you skip anyway.
A podcast player for iPhone and for the browser. Read-along transcripts, ad breaks found on the phone 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
- Read along and search
- Ads
- Off, detect, skip or quiet, per show
- Status
- Not released yet
What it does
Transcripts, ads and sync
- Read-along transcripts. 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 iPhone 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.
- Triage and browse, both. A Castro-style inbox for the shows you sort through, and an ordinary library for the shows you binge.
- 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
Lovely or capable, rarely both
Most podcast players are either lovely to look at and thin underneath, or will do anything you ask if you can find the setting.
Earshot is the attempt at both, and the transcript is the reason it can be. Once an 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 rest is the boring discipline: position sync that does not lose your place, downloads that are as good as streams, and lock-screen and AirPods controls for someone whose hands are on a wheel.
Early access
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