How to disable AI generated chapter markers?
-
I agree with everyone here. We need a way to disable this immediately or many users will permanently jump ship, including me. It’s pretty clear this is a feature added to make Pocket Casts appear more valuable to investors, and not something to improve the user experience:
1. Needlessly disrupts user flow.
Instead of being able to see the podcast title and navigate to the podcast – a workflow I’d bet most users have done – we go to a chapter navigator. I have personally tried an episode of a podcast, been enjoying it, and have used the podcast name within the player details to navigate to the podcast to queue up more episodes; and I became deeply frustrated the other day when that flow was disrupted.
2. Spoilers / confusing information.
The chapters show high-level information about the content of each chapter. This information could be considered a spoiler depending on the type of podcast you’re listening to. Because the current chapter information displays where users are used to seeing the podcast name, there is no way to avoid spoilers while using the user interface. Additionally, the accidental navigation to the chapter selector in point 1 reveals multiple spoilers at once.
3. Limited value.
Who is the intended audience for these automatic chapters? What is the intended use case for them? What value are they supposed to provide?
I can’t think of any use cases where this would be valuable. I listen to entire episodes of podcasts and I queue a lot of them up so I don’t need to interact with the UI. If there’s a particular episode of a podcast where I want to hear an interview from someone, I’ll use the author-provided show notes to get to the spot I want, but that’s a pretty rare use case for me.
4. The only user value would be to use this to identify and skip ads. And the fact that this isn’t the use case for it proves Pocket Casts’ leadership doesn’t care about users; just their ability to generate money.
Sidenote: I’ve stopped myself from subscribing to premium at least a dozen times solely because the premium feature of adding chapters to podcasts is so useless to me.
And throwing AI at things in the year 2026? Really?
Surely Pocket Casts’ leadership is aware that the concept of AI is polarizing at best. Environmental and power consumption concerns; Training data sources; Increasing lack of human connection; Losing our ability to think critically by offloading our thinking; etc. Whether you personally agree with any of those, you have to be aware of them conceptually and how podcast listeners may feel about them. And to so frivolously use AI on a feature that adds very little value at best and is a deep dissatisfier at worst shows us all how unimportant the Pocket Casts user base is.
I’ve been using Pocket Casts for 9 years and have over 234 days of listening. I’ve recommended the app to every fellow podcast listener I’ve interacted with in those 9 years. And I am days away from abandoning Pocket Casts and never looking back. Unless there is a clear and immediate turnaround of this feature*, I will make sure everyone I’ve ever recommended Pocket Casts to knows what’s going on and work to make switching to a different app as easy as possible.
*push out an update by the end of the week to allow users to turn off automatic chaptering; public announcement of this failure to understand customers’ desires (both in feature and in AI use); public announcement of Pocket Casts’ intentions with using AI, with clear, specific points on environmental and ethical concerns if Pocket Casts intends to continue using AI; announcement to all app users in plain, non-legaleze language on how our data has been, is being, and may be used to train AI, how Pocket Casts uses AI now and plans to use it in the future, and which data/models have been and plan to be used, including general server locations.
-
As my fellow Pocket Casters expressed, this feature is annoying, intrusive, and another piece of AI garbage no one ordered. Please restore the app that we love.
-
hi!
ive been a paid user since jan 15, 2016. I’m in the processing of transitioning away and won’t be coming back. Looking forward to your eventual failure!
-
I would love a way to disable these as well! I have found them inaccurate and they spoil a lot of the content before I hear it. I also find it disruptive to have to go hunting for the episode name now when I am listening in browser. I used to be able to just glance at the bottom and see it.
-
Hi! Longtime user jumping in to also say that I really hate this feature and that it’s negatively impacting my experience with Pocketcasts. If it’s not gone or I’m not given a way to disable them, I will have to migrate my podcasts to a different service.
-
We really appreciate you sharing your experiences and concerns. It helps us understand what matters most to our users. Your feedback has been shared with the team, and added to our feature requests.
-
@staff-eleanor can you provide the link to your feature roadmap?
I appreciate you responding, but the blanket “we hear our customers and have written your request down in our secret book” response is not going to be enough for most of us here.
-
+1 that I would like to disable any AI features by default but this one is kind of hilariously wrong. Even podcasts with a fairly rigid structure with audio cues have chapters that do not represent the content of the segments at all, and always seem to cut in mid-sentence. If Chapters are supported at the RSS level and controlled by the creators then I would be more interested in their implementation but as of right now it’s worse than useless since it covers up the often funny episode titles
-
I have to agree with all the other users here. Especially for those of us that listen to episodic or narrative podcasts, it just generates spoilers.
I’m sure it would be very much appreciated if we could have a timeline now this has been added to the feature requests list on what the roadmap looks like to implement at least a setting that allows us to turn it off.
Until then, I will not be using Pocketcasts, which is a shame as I am a longtime user, but this is such an ill-considered idea to put in place in the way it has been.
-
I’ve used Pocket Casts since I moved to Android in 2019. The AI generated chapters that I can’t turn off will probably get me to leave.
Ideally I want a way to opt out of all generative AI features and content.
-
@thursdaythe19th Thank you for sharing that feedback! Our team is aware of request to disable this feature and plans to add an option to disable them. While I don’t have a timeline on that, I can confirm it’s being looked at.
-
Please remove this or add an option to disable this feature. It is unnecessary AI bloat, and on top of that the chapters are in wrong language! A language that must come from IP address, since it is definitely not my system one. And even in that case, not everyone wants to use their system language for all apps. Ridiculous addition.
-
Just echoing a lot of the same complaints from above. These AI-generated chapters add little value, even when correct (which I find is not often the case). Most pods I listen to already have more accurate timestamps in the episode details if people want to jump ahead, and are obviously more careful about spoilers in those details. At the very least, any of these new features that have not received near unanimous approval and validation should come with the option to opt out. The rollout of “playlists” was similarly frustrating – I was able to adapt, but still don’t see how it improved my experience in any way.
-
I plan to post recommended apps and a short guide on how to transfer your data to a different app within the next few days.
I don’t see chapters on my app today, but I don’t know if it’s a fluke, a specific configuration set for my account (it’s not in settings), or if Pocket Casts rolled it back. I can’t tell because the Pocket Casts team has not communicated anything.
This lack of clear communication is disappointing, and is not giving confidence in the future of this app.
-
They’ve officially disabled the feature in the current version of the app– not because of the above complaints, but because the feature is apparently causing gigabytes of mobile data use. The above linked post also mentions that when the feature returns, there will be an option to keep the feature disabled.
Pocket Casts Forum 