Highlighting podcasts: Matter’s transcript generation changed how I consume audio

Imagine you’re on a walk, listening to your favorite podcast, and one of the hosts mentions a something and you want to look it up later.

What do you do?

Well, you can stop, take out your phone and take a note. Or maybe tell Siri to remind you about it.

But when you get home, the note you made mid-stride doesn’t really help, and Siri misheard every word you said. And when you try and find the section where it was mentioned, you’re all over the place. Might as well start from the beginning.

Let me tell you what I do now.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been using the read later service Matter to highlight a transcript of the podcast I’m listening to with only a double tap to my headphones. And it’s been changing how I consume podcasts ever since in a way I could never imagine.

Last year, the folks behind Matter introduced AI-generated transcripts for Podcasts and YouTube videos. At first, I didn’t think much of it -- who wants to read a podcast -- but in the past few weeks I’ve found the sweet spot for it: you can highlight the podcast transcription while listening using hardware shortcuts.

Here’s how it works:

• Send a podcast to Matter like you would any other article.
• Open Matter, go to your queue, select the podcast and press “request transcript” (which is a premium feature, by the way).
• In about five minutes (unless it has already made a transcript), you should have it.
• Now when you are listening to the podcast in Matter, “double squeeze” your headphones, either the remote button or tap on AirPods, and Matter will highlight the section of the transcript you are currently listening to.

Just like any other article, highlights are collected in Matter to be viewed later and can be transferred to other services like Readwise, along with all of my other book and article highlights and notes.

I cannot begin to stress how much this feature has changed how I listen to and gather information from podcasts. So many times I’ve heard the name of a book, movie or app and had to stop what I’m doing to try and make a note of it. Often I would end up just taking a screenshot of the play position to go back later. However, Matter’s transcript highlighting is much more like making a note in a book.

But Matter isn’t a replacement for other apps: I’m still using PocketCasts and Apple Podcasts. That’s because Matter doesn’t allow you to subscribe to podcasts and can’t save or transcribe from a private feeds, such as Dithering or Connected Pro. This is a bummer, but I understand the limitation, and my dedicated podcast app has become more of an inbox to send episodes to Matter or listen to those other feeds.

There are plenty of hoops to jump through and taps to be made, but after doing them for the past few weeks, it’s a trade off that I’ve found to be completely worth it. Podcasts cover many parts of my life, including professional development, spiritual growth and writing for this blog, and when something stands out, I want to come back to it at a later time. While Apple is introducing Podcast transcripts in iOS 17.4, Matter’s functionality puts the app in a different league. Any friction that’s introduced by adding the episodes is removed by the ease of highlighting transcript text in Matter, without grabbing my phone.

I will write more about my use of Matter and what makes it my favorite read later app, but couldn’t contain my excitement about this feature. If it sounds interesting, I recommend checking it out.

What about audiobooks? More on that to come soon…