Nathan Gathright is product designer advocating for the open podcasting ecosystem.

Spotify’s music recommendations are widely regarded as some of the best in the industry, but that hasn’t led to similar success in podcasting. The consumption patterns are too dissimilar, and to offer better recommendations, our algorithms needed better ways to separate the signal from the noise.

For many years, I moaned and groaned about the lack of easily accessible transcripts in podcasting. Apps like Descript tempted me to scratch my own itch, but I shelved my idle designs when faced with the economic realities of high-quality transcription. In 2021, I realized that the stars were finally aligning to make an app like this viable. So I set out to design