Am I the only one who wants a podcast app that reads the episode title out loud before playing it?
Tell me I'm not the only one here.
I listen to podcasts with my hands full basically all the time. Driving, cooking, half asleep. And here's the thing that gets me: an episode ends, the next one starts, and I have no idea what it even is. Sure, I can hit skip on my headphones, but skip to what? I don't know if the next one is something I'd love or something I'd want gone in five seconds. So I either sit through the intro of every episode to figure out if I want it, or I skip blindly and maybe kill something good. Both are annoying.
Why can't the app just read the title out loud before it plays? Just a quick "next up: whatever" so I actually know what I'm deciding on. Then I skip or stay, no guessing. Phones already do text-to-speech.
The way I picture it, you'd get a couple options. Bare minimum, it reads the title and then the description from the feed. Done. But descriptions are sometimes useless, a lot of them are just ad reads and links. So the better version would be a short AI summary from the actual transcript, no spoilers, so you get a real sense of what the episode is about instead of the show's marketing blurb. Let me pick which one I want. Then I decide.
Another idea along the same lines: a shuffle that keeps multi-parters together. It bugs me when shuffle throws part 3 at you before part 1. The playlist can jumble everything up however it wants, but Part 1 should always land right before Part 2, every time, etc. It seems pretty doable too, something as simple as RegEx catching the "Part 1 / Pt. 2 / (1/3)" patterns in titles, or an NLP model for the messier cases, could flag which episodes belong together and glue them into one unit before the shuffle happens.
Is it just me? Or are there other people out there blindly skipping episodes, half of them probably good, just because there's no way to know what's coming until it's already playing?