Posts tagged with "Apple Podcasts"

Apple Podcasts Is Now Available as a Web App

Apple Podcasts got the full Apple Music treatment with its own web app today. The UI is essentially the same as Apple’s native app but with the added flexibility of working on non-Apple devices. Apple says Podcasts works on all major browsers, including Safari, Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, and can be accessed in more than 170 countries and regions in their local language. If you’re an Apple Podcasts user, your progress will be synced from the web to your Apple devices, too.

Apple Podcasts' web app is nearly identical to the native version.

Apple Podcasts’ web app is nearly identical to the native version.

The web app strikes me as a win for both listeners and podcasters. Podcast fans now have more ways to enjoy their favorite shows, discover new ones, and share episodes with others. Suddenly, Apple Podcasts is cross-platform, which is still relatively rare among the most popular podcast apps, except for Pocket Casts.

Your entire library of shows is available on the web and syncs across all versions of the app.

Your entire library of shows is available on the web and syncs across all versions of the app.

Links opened on Apple devices will open in the native Podcasts app and in the browser on other devices, although on the Mac, it is possible to play episodes in a browser if you prefer. Here’s Comfort Zone playing on everyone’s current obsession, the Boox Palma:

The latest episode of [NPC](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gamecube-to-go/id1749770019?i=1000665157926) running on my Boox Palma.

The latest episode of NPC running on my Boox Palma.

It sounds great, too.

The web app also means podcasters can now reach a bigger audience. Not only are free RSS-based shows available on the web, but listeners can also subscribe and listen to paid shows.

I’ve only played around with the web version of Apple Podcasts a little, but it works well on every device I’ve tried with it so far, including the Palma, a Boox Android tablet, and a Windows gaming handheld using Chrome and Edge. In every case, the Podcasts web app worked just as well as listening in the native app.

The Origin Story of Apple Podcasts’ Transcripts→

Ari Saperstein, writing for The Guardian, interviewed Ben Cave, Apple’s global head of podcasts and Sarah Herrlinger, who manages accessibility policy for the company, about Apple Podcasts transcripts. The feature, which was introduced in March, automatically generates transcripts of podcast episodes in Apple’s catalog and has been a big accessibility win for podcast fans.

The origins of Apple’s transcription efforts began modestly:

Apple’s journey to podcast transcripts started with the expansion of a different feature: indexing. It’s a common origin story at a number of tech companies like Amazon and Yahoo – what begins as a search tool evolves into a full transcription initiative. Apple first deployed software that could identify specific words in a podcast back in 2018.

“What we did then is we offered a single line of the transcript to give users context on a result when they’re searching for something in particular,” Cave recalls. “There’s a few different things that we did in the intervening seven years, which all came together into this [transcript] feature.”

Drawing from technologies and designs used by Apple Music and Books, the feature has been lauded by the accessibility community:

“I was knocked out on how accurate it was,” says Larry Goldberg, a media and technology accessibility pioneer who created the first closed captioning system for movie theaters. The fidelity of auto-transcription is something that’s long been lacking, he adds. “It’s improved, it has gotten better … but there are times when it is so wrong.”

My experience with Podcasts’ transcripts tracks with the people interviewed for Saperstein’s story. Automatically generated transcription is hard. I’ve tried various services in the past, and I’ve never been happy enough with any of them to publish their output on MacStories. Apple’s solution isn’t perfect, but it’s easily the best I’ve seen, tipping into what I consider publishable territory. The feature makes it easy to search, select text, and generate time-stamped URLs for quoting snippets of an episode, which makes the app an excellent tool for researching and writing about podcasts, too.

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AppStories, Episode 382 – A Roomful of Suits: AltStore and Delta with Riley Testut→

This week on AppStories, we are joined by Riley Testut for a conversation about the history of AltStore from side-loaded app to official alternative app marketplace in the EU and Delta’s dominance of the Top Free App chart in the US and elsewhere..

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An Interview with Riley Testut

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On AppStories+, I propose an optimistic perspective on iOS gaming.

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Apple Releases iOS and iPadOS 17.4 with Major Safari and App Store Changes in the EU, Transcripts for Podcasts, New Emoji, and More

Today, Apple released iOS and iPadOS 17.4, the fourth major updates to the operating systems that launched in September and Federico reviewed on MacStories.

iOS 17.4 is a significant release, bringing major platform changes to iOS in Europe as part of Apple’s response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), as well as a handful of new features, including transcripts in Apple’s Podcasts app, new emoji, multilingual updates to Siri, and more.

Let’s dive in, starting with the main changes for iPhone owners in the EU.

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Add Timestamp Links to Apple Podcasts Next→

Matthew Cassinelli:

Yesterday, Apple began adding transcripts to Apple Podcasts, detailing the change on the Apple Podcast for Creators site and making them available for in iOS 17.4 developer beta 1.

This change is a huge win for accessibility, will surely improve searching in the Podcasts app, and makes quoting your favorite podcast an easy task by letting you copy and paste the text out – something I’ll definitely have to turn into a shortcut soon.

All these benefits are great in their own way and will make podcasts more shareable as a whole, allowing us to unlock so many people’s great ideas that are currently stored within hours of audio files and obscured behind URLs that point only to the show or episode as a whole.

However, I think Apple needs to go one step further in their next step and add timestamps to Apple Podcasts, a long-overdue feature that’d enable users to share links to individual moments within a podcast, directly to a specific point in the transcript.

I couldn’t agree more. From sharing to personal note-taking and research purposes, there several use cases I can think of to take advantage of timestamp links for podcast episodes – especially now that they have transcripts. (Pocket Casts, my favorite third-party podcast player, goes even further: it lets you share timestamp links and save private, time-synced bookmarks for specific parts of any episode.)

I like Matthew’s suggestions for how Apple could implement this feature, and I’ll add: Apple has already built this system for the Music app. When the company added shareable lyrics to the Music app in iOS 14.5, they did so with the ability to share selected lyrics as a special “snippet” on iMessage that is actually an interactive, timestamped song preview based on a special URL. Here’s what I wrote:

Besides Apple’s custom implementation of lyrics selection in the share sheet, what’s also interesting about this is the method the company is using to share Apple Music lyrics URLs. Unlike regular music.apple.com links that reopen a particular song or album in the Music app or play a generic preview snippet in iMessage, lyrics URLs are timestamped: in iMessage, the lyrics card has a play button that will preview the lyrics you shared inline within a conversation; if you tap the link in iMessage and the same song is already paused in the Music app, the Now Playing screen will automatically advance to the section highlighted in shared lyrics.

I’m assuming that Apple is aware of this missing feature from the Podcasts app in iOS 17.4 beta 1; I have to believe their future implementation will be very similar to what already exists in Music.

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Apple Introduces Transcripts for Podcasts

I switch to Apple system apps every summer to test the latest versions of the company’s OSes. I usually return to my favorite third-party apps over time, but Apple Podcasts has been an outlier since last summer for various reasons. The app has come a long way in recent years, and while it still doesn’t quite fit with how I like to listen to shows, it has stuck when many other system apps haven’t.

With other podcast apps struggling in recent months and Apple offering unique features that aren’t found elsewhere, Podcasts has become a compelling choice for a lot of listeners. And judging from the download numbers for AppStories, Unwind, and Magic Rays of Light, I don’t think I’m alone in this assessment.

An AppStories transcript.

An AppStories transcript.

Today, Apple added another reason to use its system app: transcripts. The new feature couldn’t be easier for podcast creators:

Apple automatically generates transcripts after a new episode is published. Your episode will be available for listening right away, and the transcript will be available shortly afterwards. There will be a short delay while we process your transcript. If portions of your episode change with dynamically inserted audio, Apple Podcasts will not display the segments of the audio that have changed since the original transcription. Music lyrics are also not displayed in the transcripts.

Listeners will be able to follow along with its transcript, much like how real-time lyrics work in Apple Music, with the text highlighting in sync with the audio for shows.

Viewing a transcript in Podcasts Connect.

Viewing a transcript in Podcasts Connect.

I’ve experimented with OpenAI’s Whisper for creating transcripts of MacStories’ podcasts, and although the results are good enough for creating a searchable episode database for our internal use, they haven’t been good enough to publish. As a result, I’m very keen to see how well Apple’s solution works. If they prefer, podcasters will be able to upload their own transcripts, too.

A downloaded transcript.

A downloaded transcript.

The transcripts generated by Apple are saved as VTT files, which is a W3C standard for displaying timed text using HTML 5’s track element. I looked at AppStories, and sure enough, there’s a transcript available for the latest episode already. As one of the show’s creators, I can access, download, edit, and re-upload the transcript. Based on my preliminary scan of the latest episode, though, the transcription is very good, including timestamps and identification of each speaker, although not by name, which isn’t surprising.

There was a lot of buzz surrounding the App Store changes coming to the EU next month. Those changes are important and will drive the story of the App Store for years to come, but there’s more to iOS 17.4, and Podcasts transcripts are a prime example of a feature that adds value and makes podcasts more accessible to everyone.

Apple Podcasts Adds Shows From Apple Music and News, Plus a Selection of Third-Party, Subscription-Based Apps

Apple Podcasts significantly expanded its Apple Music and Apple News podcast channels late yesterday and introduced podcasts for subscribers to a variety of third-party apps. In all, Apple says there are over 60 new shows comprised of over 2,500 episodes.

The Apple Music channel new features 42 shows, a significant increase from the handful that were available before. The lineup includes a mix of host-driven shows from Apple Music 1, interviews, music commentary, specials, and more, most of which are exclusive to Apple Music subscribers.

Apple News features four podcasts. News Today features a short, daily rundown of headlines from around the world; After the Whistle follows the World Cup; Apple News In Conversation is a weekly news commentary show; and Narrated News is an Apple News+ subscriber exclusive that presents audio narration of longform writing, something previously only available in the News app.

Some of the subscription-based apps that are offering podcasts. Source: Apple.

Some of the subscription-based apps that are offering podcasts. Source: Apple.

Among the subscription apps that are adding podcasts to their offerings are The Washington Post, Calm, Lingokids, Bloomberg, Sleep Cycle, and several others.

I haven’t had a chance to try any of the app add-on shows because I don’t subscribe to any of the participating apps. However, I spent some time this morning browsing through the Apple Music and Apple News offerings. Most of what is now available from Apple Music or Apple News in Podcasts was already available in their own apps. Still, I like having it available in Podcasts, where both channels’ shows fit in naturally with the other podcasts I enjoy, making Podcasts a one-stop destination for spoken audio. Listening in the Podcasts app also has the advantage of allowing listeners to receive notifications when a new episode is released and queue episodes for playback.

One thing I’d love to see the Apple Music and Apple News shows add is show notes. Links to songs played so they can be added to a listener’s library would be a useful addition to the Apple Music podcasts, as would links to materials on the topics covered by Apple News.

Apple Podcasts Expands Its Analytics and Marketing Tools→

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Today, Apple announced new analytics and marketing tools for podcast creators.

Apple Podcast analytical tools are being expanded to provide a wealth of new anonymized information about paid podcast subscriptions. The new stats will cover information about free trials, conversion rates to paid subscriptions, financial data, and more. There are a number of ways to filter the new metrics and display trends, too.

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Apple also announced additional delegated delivery partners, who allow podcasters to publish their paid subscription episodes to Apple’s platform using the delivery partner’s tools. The latest to join the program are Audiomeans, Captivate, Podbean, Podspace, and Transistor.

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Finally, Apple and Linkfire are partnering to offer podcasters smart links to landing pages for their shows where listeners can access their shows and subscriptions. The links, which are commonly used in the music industry to give fans a way to connect to a musician’s material from multiple services, can be used by podcasters to feature their shows on social media, on websites, in newsletters, and anywhere else they want to link to their shows. Linkfire will offer analytics to users of their linking system, which will be anonymized. Linkfire’s new podcast links will be available this fall and include free and paid tiers of service starting at $9.99/month.

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Apple Podcasts Adds New Subcategories and Refreshes Recommendations

As I wrote earlier today, Apple has a lot of plans for its Podcasts app this fall, but the company is not waiting to roll out all of the changes to the app. Yesterday, Apple Podcasts added the following nine new subcategories to the app’s search tab on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV:

The new categories also feature their own charts with top shows and episodes in listeners’ regions.

Alongside the addition of new subcategories, the Apple Podcasts editorial team has updated its recommendations with new Podcasts Essentials and added the ability to find podcasts in more than 20 languages if you live in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia.

It’s great to see Apple Podcasts receiving as much attention as it has and continuing to get updates outside of major OS releases. I’ve been using Apple Podcasts on iOS 17 for the past couple of weeks, and I like what I’ve seen so far a lot.