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. -
Since the Android app is open source, I have created this update to add a setting to the Settings Appearance menu for users to be able to hide transcripts on the episode detail view in case anyone is still following this: https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-android/pull/4886
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@bravely8dc6f582aa it looks like they decided not to accept the pull request. you can always pull down my forked repo (https://github.com/fullsnackengineer/pocket-casts-android), create a devprod build and install it on your phone.
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I was hoping there would be some update given how long ago this issue was reported, but it looks like the View Transcript AI button is here to stay. Does anyone have recommendations for other podcast apps?
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The problem is that ai transcripts are a paid feature, so even though many of us don’t want to see the transcript button even if we paid, pocket casts is financially disincentivized to remove it…at least I assume that’s their thinking behind closing my pull request and not making the update to the Android app. That’s precisely why I left the default behavior in my update to show the thing. In their comment, they seemed pretty ignorant of why anyone would want to disable it.
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Existence of the AI transcript button, altough extremely unnecesary IMNSHO, is not as problematic as is the behaviour of this button.
On basicaly static page with basic info on the podcast and the description there is a movement after a second or two with the AI button suddenly appearing and moving the description which user just started to read. It’s a user interface and usability abomination.
One way it could be solved is that button has a fixed position AND presence. If somebody clicks on it, it could show the transcript or show the error message in some marketingwise way.
I still stand firmly on the opinion that it should be an OPT-IN feature or at least a disableable feature. -
My cynical take would be that this AI integration is just virtue signalling. The (or someone in) management got FOMO and thinks it’s important to have AI in the product because everyone else has and therefore it needs to be prominently placed and always in your face, so nobody misses it, even though the output quality isn’t great and a transcript button makes more sense in the player screen (where the buttons can be configured and be removed if not needed). Like with other vendors who integrated AI in their product, it will sometimes later serve as an excuse to raise pricing because you all got AI functions now.
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