Detailed Chapters Generator

Podcasters should never have to say "Check the show notes". If there is a link in the show notes and they are discussing the topic, that info should appear contextually immediately in the app

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Inspiration

There have been many times when I was listening to a podcast and heard an interesting book, website, product, white paper, NFT, tweet or video mentioned by the podcaster. Podcasters put a lot of work into making show notes accurate and useful, but much of the time that content never gets seen or it gets forgotten about. Podcasters will often say "I'll put it in the show notes" but I almost never check and sometimes I miss out on important or very interesting context regarding the current conversation.

What it does

The "Detailed Chapters Generator" reads the podcast description and searches the entire transcript of the podcast to find when each of the links in the show notes were mentioned (if they were mentioned at all) and creates a chapter marker at that time. This chapter data can be hosted with the podcast either in the RSS feed or in the mp3 file itself and will appear in real time when the content is mentioned and display it directly to the user in the podcast app.

How we built it

The "Detailed Chapters Generator" uses Claude's extended context window to understand the entirety of the podcast and match that agains the detailed links the podcasters has added to the description tag of the RSS Feed.

               "Transcript"      "Podcast Description"
                     |                    |
                     v                  v
               +-------------------+
               |   Chapter File    |
               +-------------------+
                         ^
                         |
                   "Podcast App"

Challenges we ran into

  • I've wanted to do this for a long time, but I could not because the transcripts for most good podcasts are pretty long! The 100k context window finally allowed me to very simply send both the transcript and the link text to Claude to figure out when the content was mentioned.

  • Because podcasting is an open standard every podcast host does things a little differently. Latent Space is hosted on Substack so some additional modifications will need to be made to my existing script to work with other podcasts that generate their RSS Feed slightly differently.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I ran into some issues with getting complete responses, but was able to work around those issues with some help from the hackathon slack channel!

What we learned

I can't go back to not having a 100k context window :D

What's next for Detailed Chapters Generator

I want to clean the script up so the Latent Space Podcast can use this chapters generator for their podcast and I want to make it more adaptable and generally available for any podcaster to use!

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