The smart way to listen to podcasts (Using AI!)

Podcasts are all the rage now, and it’s no wonder. With so much audio content to choose from, it’s important to be smart about how we consume it.

The usual way of listening to podcasts is inefficient, cumbersome and time-consuming.

In this article, we’ll explore three key parts of listening to podcasts: finding podcasts you like, listening efficiently and smartly, and taking notes and bookmarking your favorite parts. And we will learn how to leverage new tech i.e. AI to enhance and elevate these experiences.

Finding Podcasts You Like

The first step in the podcasting journey is to find the podcasts that align with your interests. Podcast directories such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify are great for discovering new podcasts, but honestly, this is not how you should be searching for podcasts.

Why? because usually you are looking for a certain topic, or genre to listen to, and part of the way you decide if you like the podcast or not is the way the host speaks, the speed, and the depth they go to into the topic. All things you can gauge just from looking at the title and reading descriptions.

The solution? well, you have many smart ways that can help you find cool podcasts:

• TikTok: Yep! most podcasts now realize the potential of TikTok and post short videos from their podcasts, so if you search with hashtags that conatain #podcast #podcastclips and your topics you can find some awesome videos to watch and go through quickly till you find something you like
• AI-podcast search engines: If you use Snipd (my favorite podcast app ever!), you can simply go to the “for you” tab, and just like Tiktok, search for topics and it will generate a list of clips from different podcasts that you can go through and when you find one you like, just go for the whole episode.
• Podcast curators and search engines: Websites like Podunt, Podhash, Podcastnotes (Highly recommended!), Listennotes, and the newly released Harknotes which has an interesting concept where they based on your interest create curated playlists of podcast moments daily for you. I’ve also recently discovered Podyssey, which is a podcast-based social media with vibrant community recommending, categorizing and reviewing podcasts.

Using these tools, you can much easily find podcasts that matches what you are looking for instead of wasting time looking and titles, reading descriptions and finding reviews. Also Podcast awards is the closest thing to Podcasting Emmy’s by People choice awards.

Listening Efficiently and Smartly

When you listen to a podcast, it can be for one of 2 reasons usually: :

• Leisure/ pleasure
• Getting some sort of knowledge either for a research you are working on or for some topic you are interested to hear what is said on podcasts about it.

If you are listening for leisure and pleasure, by all means, don’t think about being efficient; enjoy the story or the cool fun podcast you are listening to, but if you are just in it to get some info, being smart and efficient pays off immensely!

Enter: Snipd. (If you have never listened to my podcast you are missing a lot!, I’ve mentioned it in episode no.1 regarding productivity. PS, podcast is in Arabic), It’s an AI-based podcast player that uses AI to transcript podcasts and convert them into navigable chapters so you can:

• Skip to chapters you like
• And lately they even introduced something cooler! They created 5-minute summaries for long podcasts so you can listen to the summary and decide if you want to check the whole episode.
• More Podcast summaries: If you like Arabic podcasts, you can also check Wajeez وجيز, it is a nice Jordanian-based startup that has an app for book summaries, but they recently launched وجيز كاست where they create summaries of cool Arabic podcast where you can listen to summary of the episodes and get directed to the original podcast if you like it; My podcast Nawarny is currently featured there.

You can also get deeper specially if you are researching, and use AI-backed search engines like Omnisearch and Podsearch, which utilize a different concept:

They take highly rated and famous podcasts like Lex Friedman, Joe Rogan, and My first million and give you the ability to search for content inside the episodes to find the episodes where a certain keyword, concept or phrase is present!

And if you are a Huberman-head like me, you can now access Huberman AI site where you can ask questions in a ChatGPT like way and get answers from the whole notes of the show, together with where the topics where mentioned in each episode. These types of sites are popping out all the time now so search, maybe you will find your favorite podcast’s AI searchable engine too.

Personally, my favorite way to listen for topics I like when I’m researching is just searching on Snipd, and creating a list of curated podcast notes/clips from different podcasts talking about that topic, that way I am efficiently listening only to the sections i care about, and also hearing everything said said topic from different podcasts.

Taking Notes, Bookmarking, and Revisiting Your Favorite Parts

Now one of the most important aspects of being smart when listening to podcasts is the ability to take notes, bookmark and revisit the podcasts you like. It has always been an issue for me, until Snipd was launched.

But its not the only choice though, you can also try:

• Snipd: My all time favorite, i spoke a lot about it this article but for me this was my life-saver for podcast notes. I can’t recommend it enough.
• Inspod: Which is a tool powered by Listen notes that allows you to take notes while listening same as Snipd, but the cool part about Inspod is that you can do that also on web, and also you can do it for Youtube videos!
• Momento: Same like Snipd, just different UI, honestly i prefer Snipd, but check both and see what works best for you.

And finally, if you are a power note-taker, most of these tools offer integrations with Readwise to export automatically your bookmarks and notes for further processing and learning. I highly recommend trying Readwise, its an amazing tool!