The podcast
By far one of my favorite podcasts to listen to, the Bookworm Podcast “is dedicated to doing more than just reading books. Joe and Mike read a book every two weeks and discuss ways to apply the authors lessons to their lives.”
Several times recently, Mike has wondered which book sparked the action item of ranking his friends. I kept wondering the same thing, and wondered how hard it would be to run the episodes through an automated transcription process and then search the results to find the answer to this question.
Psst: it's Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt, if you were also curious. Search for “social audit” to find the moment.
Whisper
I ran the audio through whisper.cpp, a C++ port of OpenAI's Whisper engine. It produces results that are not 100% accurate, but close enough to search. Once I realized what I had on my hands, I couldn't stop myself from creating a full website that everyone could use to search these transcripts. Is this useful? I don't know, but it sure was fun to build.
Tools used
This site was built using Laravel and Tailwind CSS, with a little bit of Alpine.js sprinkled in. It is deployed to a DigitalOcean droplet by Laravel Forge.