home ¦ Archives ¦ Atom ¦ RSS

PodSearch Backstory

I don’t listen to too many episodes of Jon Gruber’s The Talk Show. When I do, I find the show’s unofficial transcripts at PodSearch, really useful.

Here’s the backstory on how David Smith brought PodSearch into the modern AI era:

Thankfully since then OpenAI has released Whisper a powerful speech-to-text engine that I can run right on my Mac and results in transcripts that are shockingly good. They aren’t quite at the level of a human transcriber but they get darn close in many instances. Getting close to the level where you could use them to grab a pull quote with only a little bit of tidying up to do.

Moreover, because I can just run this locally it is essentially ‘free’ to run, costing only my CPU time. So I can much more easily keep it up to date and incorporate the entire back catalogs of the shows I’m indexing.

The updated site can be found at podsearch.david-smith.org. I hope you find it helpful and fun to explore. You can easily search for the occurrences of particular keywords within a particular show and find the timestamp of when it was said.

© 2008-2025 C. Ross Jam. Built using Pelican. Theme based upon Giulio Fidente’s original svbhack, and slightly modified by crossjam.