Feature Request: Ability to turn off the appearance of automated transcripts
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I’m using v7.93, and it still has the annoying “View Transcript” section pushing down the episode description in the episode view. Will the ability to hide that be in the next release? If so, when do you expect that release to be ready?
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I listened to a podcast episode checking the automatically generated transcript. While it’s not necessarily terrible, it’s confusing to read along. E.g. it doesn’t state who is talking, so it’s basically just simple subtitles, not what I’d understand a transcript actually is. The intro had missing parts, the paragraph breaks don’t make much sense, it also omits words or sometimes even just letters in a word throughout the episode – which were not strictly necessary to understand it, but like this, it doesn’t work well as subtitles either (for some reason, a lot of “z” were missing). It also had troubles with consistency and understanding context, e.g. writing abbreviations differently throughout the episode or sometimes understanding it as the correct abbreviation and sometimes just inventing a nonsensical word sounding like it. I really wish that developers would treat AI (or specifically LLM) output as something which isn’t reliable by design and often gets stuff wrong and being upfront about it, instead of selling it as a finished product supporting something for which a human transcriber would be fired for… just to tick a box in a feature list. What’s the point in offering a transcription which is mostly right but you can’t really rely on? But that’s the problem with the AI industry in general… lots of lofty promises but if you look closely and verify what it’s actually doing, it falls apart.
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Hi @0cbd7c3f60e2009! Thanks for sharing your feedback. This feature was highly requested by other users primarily for accessibility. It is definitely no replacement for transcripts provided by authors themselves. Those would be the best, as they include the correct context that the authors intended. In many cases, however, the authors do not provide their own transcripts, and this is where the generated transcripts come in.
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So not only is this garbage AI thing still there with no way to disable it, but now there are ads in the app. You’re heading in the wrong direction, especially since the only way you offer to remove the ads is a subscription. I’d entertain the idea of a one-time payment (like I did with Plex), but I don’t need another subscription.
I guess I’ll just have to install an old version of the app before the AI stuff was added and not allow it to update. -
I see there is no activity with this “feature request”, which is more of a bug removal the anything else.
Many people have written already about the abomination that is View Transcripts. Podcasts are not video, I listen to them while doing something else, be it driving, riding a bike, walking, washing dishes, sitting on a plain, train or bus while on my travels for work. Podcasts are enjoyed via ears, not eyes.
There’s a recurring “many people requested it” and normal way is to add it as a feature, as something to have to enable or go to. Now? It’s AI for the marketing/share price sake beeing push down our throats with no way to turn it off. The major problem is with the way it’s made. It’s not a button, allways on and allways there. It’s a button that comes on a second or two after you click on the podcast and have already started reading the podcast description. That way the abomination (well, a view transcript button) appears and the podcast description text moves down, thus instead of beeing supposedly “a very requested feature” (which I doubt sincerely) it becomes something that broke my reading stream.
I’m realy interested who did the UI testing here and who signed on the solution. Beeing an enginneer I’m quite certain it was some marketing brainiac thinking about “let’s put AI anywhere and make it so nobody misses it ever”.
Yes, the View transcript is nothing more then succumbing to AI hipe and forcing it down users’ gullets.
How to solve this? Make it an opt-in. Make the selector to enable the View transcript feature.
Yes, you won’t have the bragging rights of “all the users of PocketCasts are using our AI [censored], but you’ll have a propper user interface again. And many happy users, if that counts for something these days ;) -
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@matt3138 thank you for your feedback on this. I will forward this along to our team to take into consideration as we refine our offerings going forward.
@bravely8dc6f582aa @0cbd7c3f60e2009 and thank you two for sharing your thoughts on the placement of the transcript button. This will be shared with our design team so they can best refine the layout of the episode details screen with subsequent design updates.
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It’s not the placement, don’t twist my words!!!
Placement is not an issue, existence is! Make it optional. Make it so those who use it can turn it on. Or, if there realy is no way out of AI marketing porridge you all are cooking yourself into… make it possible to turn it off.
I don’t understand how you could misinterpret what I’ve written. There’s almost no way it’s not intentional.
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