Castle

Tinybits

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About this app

What if you could easily search podcast audio? What if you could read what you’re hearing? And what if the entire podcast listening world was blown wide open to be accessed by more people: the hearing-impaired, those learning a new language, people learning to read, groups studying a topic and sharing notes together?

Castle Player is a podcast player first.

It also transcribes podcast episodes.

Did you catch that? Castle Player has podcast transcription capabilities. Automated transcripts are generated directly on device and then stored in a database. The more users there are generating transcripts, the more transcripts there are available. Our subscription model unlocks access to all user-generated transcriptions. Once a podcast episode transcript is made, it exists for all subscribers. It sounds simple, but let’s unpack the implications of having crowd-sourced text available for podcast episodes. This leads to benefits such as:

Searching audio with text
Sharing sections of audio with friends
SEO for podcast creators
Accessibility for the hearing impaired
A tool for literacy
A tool for learning a new language (see and hear what’s being said)
Pulling in other related articles and links

Search for and subscribe to podcasts, create playlists and listen to episodes on your phone. We value a smooth podcast listening experience and are thrilled to bring more accessibility to others who can enjoy great content creation from the world of podcasting.

Ratings and reviews

I really want to love this app. I really want transcripts of the podcasts I've listened to, so that I can search them in the future, and more easily post quotes from them. So... It has SO much potential. But ..... It is SO slow, to such a degree that it doesn't work for me. Like, I can't even log in. And I couldn't see anyway of closing my account, nor clearing my subscriptions... The app is really new, and it always takes time to get the bugs out. So I hope soon to change this to 5 stars

For now, seems like a decent enough app. I'm sceptical about the on device transcrptions, and how long it's gonna stay free. I fear one of two things happening; it either getting discontinued due to inability to monetise, like the shuffle app (RIP shuffle), or them locking all the interesting features behind a subscription, like what happened to snipd. So I won't recommend switching all your stuff to castle rn. As of now though, PLEASE ADD SEEK FORWARD AND BACK BUTTONS TO THE NOTIFICATION CARD.

Promising idea. Lacking quite a few features like sort order, etc Transcripts haven't been working for me. Doesn't transcribe and whatever it does do is complete gibberish. Plus you need to speed up the transcribing feature to be practical.

What's new

- Fix bug where partially created transcripts would be considered complete
- Update player to keep last selected tab state