Podcast Preview
Inspiration
The inspiration we had for this project is from listening to various podcast episodes and find it underwhelming. Podcast episodes are long, usually 30 mins to 1 hour. Many times, we have found ourselves disappointed with the episode and wasted a good portion of our time listening to it. With the Podcast Preview app, we have displayed the highlights of various podcast episodes in quick 15 -45 sec snippets that users may find intriguing and would want to listen in to hear more. That way, we can save time searching through the endless long streams of podcast episodes and quickly dive into discussions that we find more interesting.
What it does
Podcast Preview allows users to discover new podcasts by listening to highlighting snippets from recorded episodes. In this way, users can skip sitting through a whole dull 30-60min podcast and, instead, invest listening to podcast episodes they find interesting. If they find the snippet interesting, they have the ability to listen to the whole podcast. If not, they can continue quickly discovering snippets of podcasts eps to find one that draws their ears.
How I built it
We used Flask to handle the backend. This includes user authentication using flask-login, and handling api routing to handle logical flows. In addition, we utilized ListenNotes api to retrieve podcast data such as audio and episode description. The api paired with our backend made it possible to extract clips from the podcasts. For mobile dev, we used React Native so it can be cross compatible between both iOS and Android. In this way, we sent requests to the backend to handle most of the logical processing to display needed information to the mobile device.
Challenges I ran into
This was our first time using React Native and doing web development and so that was the most challenging part. It was difficult to understand different aspects of React as well as the framework itself. Most of our time developing was on the mobile side. Another challenge we had was understanding how to find clips of the podcasts to highlight in the feed. Through more thoughts and discussions, we found that utilizing language processing and audio analysis, we could have a better understanding of the podcasts and generate potential highlights to display.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We’re proud of developing a mobile app as our front end. Although we had no experience and saw that the project would be a better fit as a mobile app, we decided to tackle the challenge and become more ambitious. We’re also proud of building the backend and getting the ListenNotes api. We found that we had to apply to get the token from ListenNotes and it could have taken 12 hours to determine we were approved or not. Gladly we were able to get approved within the hour we applied lol.
What's next for Podcast Preview
Some additional features we could had is to have a search feature to discover a group of related podcasts and filter the feed through that. In addition, we could add a way to share snippets of the podcasts with other users as a way to share some content that others may like.
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