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Comment by hunter2_ | Hacker News Reader

One thing that visual media (text, image, silent video) offers but audio typically struggles with is the ability to skim; to spend way less time than the content really deserves, in an effort to figure out if you should take a deep dive and engage. Do you have any plans to cater to people in a rush, whatever their reason might be? For example, news radio broadcasts (think AM radio with 10 minute cycles) often use automatic processing that doesn't just speed up the recording, but actually cuts out silence, so the individual words themselves aren't faster, but the clip as a whole is faster. Maybe automatic transcripts, too?

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I agree.

I built https://taaalk.co which looks a bit like Sonar but for text based long-form conversations - so skimming is possible.

The current site is content-less as I had to change servers.

Previous content can be seen on archive.org (https://web.archive.org/web/20210316214650/https://taaalk.co...)

I'm going to be reuploading the content and getting the community started again, so if you want to sign up to it please do and I will email you when it gets going. (A good place to sign up is on the Start a Conversation page, where you can leave your details for other Taaalkers to start talking with you).

One of the millions of features I had penciled in for my podcasting app - that didn't survive a rewrite in typescript - was the ability to detect different speakers and skip to the next one. Probably even topic based could work too if you can convert the audio to words at specific instances, subject detection may or may not work well I guess. Worth a try.

I actually know someone developing technology for this use case. She's hearing impaired and is trying to build an application that transcribes voice to text from a variety of people in a single conversation. Very helpful for her in social situations where she can't lipread multiple people at once, especially if they're wearing masks obviously.

https://imanyco.com/

Cool stuff. The pioneering efforts of a11y tools can inform UI patterns in ways that go well beyond accommodating the specific needs they were invented for. Having witnessed a blind person using VoiceOver on her iPhone with a very high speed (like, the 2x or 4x setting on many video players doesn't even come close to the speed I'm talking about!) actually contributed to the idea I presented in my earlier comment: consuming audio in a "speed reading" fashion. Nobody's got the patience to drink from the social media firehose at conversational speed.

I believe PocketCasts (the podcast app) has that feature and I really love it (except when listening to audio dramas or music :P - thankfully can be configured per podcast).

It really makes a lot of difference especially with podcasts since people tend to enunciate a bit more than usual and end up adding micro-silences that can easily add up into minutes.

It also tells you how much time that feature has saved you, which is kind of fun to see.

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