My Overcast is coming up for renewal at $19.99/year (a price hike of $5), and I’m using the opportunity to re-evaluate my podcast listening apps. There are two use cases here - mine, and my wife’s.
We both listen to a few actual podcasts, and a ton of audiobooks. I can get whatever audiobooks we want to listen to into an RSS feed, which we can suck into whichever podcast app we want. We’ve been using Overcast because the audio engine is fantastic.
For me, I just need high-quality audio, a single playlist with a few podcasts auto-added, and a “currently listening” sort of list so when I’m working through a few different books, I can resume any of them. I don’t really need transcripts to follow along, but if I had a decent-quality transcript and could “bookmark” or save the text of something important I wanted to reference, that would be awesome.
My wife’s use case is a bit different. She listens to one thing at a time, and listens until she’s done. She likes to read text while listening to audio, as it helps her retain more of the information. None of this ever needs to be “bookmarked”, but the quality of the transcript is more important since she’s actually reading along. Right now she actually gets the book and the audiobook at the same time, so she can follow along. That works, but it’s inefficient.
With AI getting better all the time, I’m wondering if there are better solutions than Overcast for our podcast/audiobook listening - particularly with transcription. The transcription wouldn’t even need to be real-time. We could tell it to start, and just let the phone do it overnight. Doesn’t need to be free, but it would be great if it were somewhere in the neighborhood of that Overcast subscription.
Any recommendations?