Developer: Snipd
Price: Free [$9.99/£9.99 per month Premium]
Size: 109 MB
Version: 3.0.87
Platform: iPhone
The Apple Podcasts app recently added a podcast transcription feature, but as so often with Apple, it was far from the first to market. Snipd has been doing this for several years now, and much more besides.
This slick app can serve as your go to podcast app, enabling you to search for, import, play and share your favorite audio productions through a nicely polished interface.
The ‘Create snip’ button will summarise and save the current section
Where Snipd really stands out, however, is in what you can do with those podcasts. You’ll find that many of the most popular podcasts will have already received an AI pass when you encounter them, with summaries and chapter breakdowns generated by artificial intelligence.
You can also condense and package individual sections of a podcast, which is really useful for retaining the knowledge that they impart. Whenever you find an interesting section of a particular podcast, just press the ‘Create snip’ button at the bottom, and the app will summarise the main point. It’ll then save that section, together with a transcript and the relevant audio snippet, to the Snips tab, ready to be revisited or shared.
AI summarises podcasts and divide them into chapters
In our experience the quality of these AI summaries is spookily on point, with accurate round-ups formed using natural language. This will come as no surprise to anyone who’s used a modern AI chatbot. The coolest part? If you hear something you don’t want to forget, a tap on your headphones will create a ‘snip’ on-the-fly and even sync it to your favorite notes app for posterity.
Snipd is a free app that grants you unlimited podcast listening and access to AI features for two podcasts per week. Paying for Snipd Premium grants you unlimited access to podcasts with AI features, as well as letting you run AI on up to 15 hours of unprocessed podcasts per month. At $9.99/£9.99 per month, it’s not cheap.
Running AI processing can take around 20 minutes
AI processing can take around 20 minutes, but the app will notify you when it’s ready.
There’s also a ‘For you’ tab that will supply Snip recommendations from a range of podcasts. The app even makes it simple to import your podcast subscriptions from Apple Podcasts and other podcast services using Shortcuts.
You can import your subscriptions from other services
It all results in a Podcast app that’s as fully featured as they come. This results in the one true criticism we have of Snipd – it’s a very busy app. The sheer range of things it can do and types of AI-generated summaries it can generate can lead to a sense of being lost in its UI, looking around for a back-up button to get you to a familiar landmark.
This alone means that Snipd isn’t the one podcast app to rule them all. Its sheer density means that it’s specifically suited to those wishing to get to the gist of lengthy podcasts, or to catalogues the knowledge contained within. If you’re a researcher, a journalist, a student, or simply someone who wants to remember things more clearly, this app may be for you.
‘For you’ helps you discover fresh podcasts
For your average casual podcast user, you’ll probably have a better time of it with Apple Podcasts or one of the other big hitters. For those wanting to dive deeper, however, Snipd is genuinely next-level stuff.