Inspiration
Though all of us in the group have faced this issue before, Torja was the pioneer and biggest advocator of this idea. Being a podcast connoisseur, the last straw came when he tried to find a quote he heard from a The Lowe Post podcast but came out empty-handed.
What it does
Simply type in the quote or phrase you're thinking of to the best you can remember and we'll search through various transcripts of YouTube videos, podcasts, movie scripts and so on. In addition, we'll provide the timestamps as well, a nice bonus that will save you from binary searching through a 2 hour podcast. What really helps is if you can provide what group of YouTube videos or Podcast show you think you're looking for; that way you can be confident those are included in the search!
How we built it
At the base, we have a simple website hosted of Azure leveraging a powerful search library. We then sourced some common media sources to get us started such as popular YouTube videos or common podcasts. Then is the bulk of our work; our importing technology. By leveraging a combination of API's including Google's Text-to-Speech, we can transcribe specified sources and add them your search. Alternatively, sign-in with your Spotify account and we'll look at your saved Podcast episodes (the likely sources you're trying to recall!) and we can add them to our library automatically as well.
Challenges we ran into
Any kind of "glue" product requires some painful testing process to align all the edges. This project was no exception. Auth tokens everywhere, promising third-party API's turned sour, incompatible formats, you name it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of how we managed to integrate several APIs to make an application that is easy to use. We are also proud of the flexibility of our application; having different sources of data to make it easy for the user to quickly retrieve something from their watch history.
What's next for PlayItBack
We're hoping to expand our account integration so that users can sign in with their iTunes, SoundCloud, etc. With that, more podcast users will be able to benefit from PlayItBack! PlayItBack will also have search trends generated so that users can see what quotes their peers are searching for.
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