Introducing Steno.fm

For many years, I moaned and groaned about the lack of easily accessible transcripts in podcasting. Projects like David Smith’s Podcast Search and Descript tempted me to scratch my own itch, but I shelved my idle designs when faced with the economic realities of high-quality transcription. As pieces of the puzzle started to come together, namely the <podcast:transcript> tag, I dusted off my mockups and revisited the project. And after a few delays, I’m excited to launch this early preview.

Meet Steno.fm

Steno.fm is a proof-of-concept podcast app designed with first-class support for transcripts. Today, we’re launching the alpha experience.

Check it out!

Transcripts

The transcripts are made possible by all the hosts and podcasters that have adopted the transcript tag. Currently, there’s over 24,000 podcasts and nearly 600,000 episodes using the transcript tag.

Explore

The homepage features collections of podcasts that support the transcript tag. Please submit your show for an existing collection or propose a new collection by emailing hello@steno.fm.

Thanks to the generous work of John Spurlock, Our Trending page features episodes with both a transcript tag and the OP3 prefix.

Chapters

Chapters are another great tool for podcasters to provide more structured data to enrich their episodes, and we’re proud to support them.

Person

Steno.fm has also added support for the <podcast:person> tag. You can now see credits for everyone involved in the production of a podcast in a new tab on any episode pages.

Trailer, Season & Episode

We’re also taking advantage of the <podcast:trailer>, <podcast:season>, and <podcast:episode> tags. Season and episode numbers appear in the Episodes tab on any show page, and any podcast with a trailer will have that highlighted at the top of the show page. Otherwise, serial shows will promote their first episode, and episodic shows will promote their latest episode.

Funding

Adding the <podcast:funding> tag was another quick win. You can locate it alongside other show-level details on the new Info tab.

Search

We’ve also created a search field that incorporates multiple podcast APIs, including the Podcast Index, to help you find any show you’re looking for.

GUID

We’re using the <podcast:guid> value for our show URLs. These UUIDs have a number of advantages over base64-encoded feed URLs, and we hope to see more products take advantage of them.

More to come!

If you’d like to get involved, please reach out via Twitter or email. In the meantime, subscribe to the blog to follow our progress.