Implementation Status: Pending
Implementation Date: N/A
Author: @leyota
Abstract Summary: ApeCast, your app with and audio library full of curated X Spaces and ApeCoin-related recordings! Save time by searching for keywords and listening to specific segments. Read summaries of the audio in the language of your choice for quick overviews. This app will help you catch up on spaces, while not having to listen to the whole thing which can sometimes be 3+ hours!
ApeCast will be released for both iOS and Android.
Overall Cost: 50,000 ApeCoin
Related AIPs:
Timeline Updates:
03/12/24 : We are kicking things off officially this week! I’m working with the foundation to get the initial funds released. Other things that are also being worked on:
- Mapping out UX flows and sending them to the designer
- Researching the feasibility of using certain libraries
03/28/24:
I have updates on three fronts, We have the initial versions of the designs done. We are going back and forth ironing out some of the UI interactions in more detail. Some sneak peaks attached 
We have started work on the backend part. We will give creators/hosts a backend system so they can manage their own content/feed. This will include the ability to add/edit episodes and edit the transcriptions.
On the app side of things we decided to experiment/tackle the transcription part first. It’s actually a lot more challenging than we initially thought to have a live transcription running (with the currently playing sentence highlighted) for long form content. Since the transcription is pages long, in our tests, most android phones will have trouble showing things smoothly. We are trying to figure out a way to do this in a way that’s not very compute intensive for the phone. A bit of R&D involved, but that’s exactly why we wanted to tackle this problem first.
This week and next week, we will be doing the foundational work to build the app and backend system. We are using the “measure twice cut once” approach since we know the requirements ahead of time.
04/14/24:
The backend system is being built without too many issues. To show our thanks to the community we decided to add one more feature to the the feature list; include external crypto podcasts as well. This involves building out a pipeline to process external feeds as well and will provide the same transcription layer on top of these podcasts. The goal here is to have one app for all your web3 listening needs. We won’t be adding too many podcasts in the beginning to keep costs manageable but depending on depending on demand we might increase this. Our focus still remains making twitter spaces more accessible.
05/01/24:
The app is coming along nicely. The designs are taking some time to implement equally well on both iOS and Android. To ensure we don’t leave a trail of bugs, we’ve decided to test on both platforms simultaneously while developing at the cost of some speed. This should payoff later because we don’t have to go back and fix things for the other platform.
Due to some unforeseen UI issues we might not be able to hit the alpha version release that’s supposed to happen in 2 weeks (05/12/2024). Estimate that the delay is about 2 weeks. Will keep you guys updated. On the plus side, Android release will happen simultaneously with iOS. Might even end up being faster because new apps take a long time to get approved on iOS.
05/16/24:
We are on track to submit the app to the app store in 2 weeks. We have done the first iteration of the barebones app, including transcript rendering. There are minor UI tweaks we are working through and testing on both platforms.
The backend allows us to upload any audio and it has the ability to run the transcription job and prep the necessary files for the app. It can also read and parse podcast RSS feeds. This means we can support externally hosted podcasts. We are supporting some crypto related long form podcasts from the get go so that you see summaries and read transcripts on long form podcasts without having to listen to the whole thing.
Also going through some legal work to register a separate entity and release this app through that entity.
05/31/24:
We have submitted the app to the app store! We expect this to take a few weeks. Apple is usually nit picky about the smallest things when you release an app for the first time. Updates after that should be very fast.
In the mean time we are working on adding summaries and their translations. The flow for this will be a very manual in the beginning (managed by me). After that we expect to do this in a more automated fashion.
There’s also an important changes to the creator portal. We have switched focus to being a transcription/summary/translation editor for a podcast feed rather than an audio feed editor. This means we’ve removed the ability to edit metadata and upload audio. We are instead building ways to quickly create transcriptions and summaries. AI transcribers have issues like mis-transcribing niche words . We will also include tools to edit these. These edited transcript will show in the app.
The main reason for this is because we don’t want to re-invent the wheel. There are so many great audio feed editors out there (some of which are even free!). Some have built in audio editors as well, which is extremely convenient. For example, if you want to remove the silence in the beginning/end you could do it right after upload. There’s no benefit in us rebuilding these features. We want to give complete control to the hosts of shows. So we will setup the initial feeds and give them control over it. If they are not interested in managing it, we will do it for them. This is better than us hosting it on our own platform because this way the audio feed will be be in complete control of the hosts. Even if our platform went down, the show feed will be work. They also now will have an independent RSS feed that can get published and will work on any podcast app. This will be an added bonus for all the hosts because they will now have much better distribution outside of X. Creators first.
The advantage of using ApeCast would be the added transcriptions, summary and search features. We would read from the same audio feed and combine it with our transcription data to provide users with a great listening experience. Can’t wait to get this out there!
06/14/24
After submitting the app, Apple rejected it because we had some incomplete features - no search and summaries. Mentions of summaries are easy enough to remove but removing search means we have to modify the design of the app just to release it and then add it back in again. This feels like extra work for no real benefit so instead we’re just focusing on finishing the search and summaries feature. We’re probably a week away from finishing this and then we’ll resubmit again.
I know we are not following the exact pathway laid out in the roadmap but that comes with the territory of developing a unique app. To ensure our incentives are aligned, we still have not taken any other payment of APE from the foundation after the initial payment. At this point it’s looking like we will release the app as fully baked product (maybe with a few bugs).
Sorry guys, it’s coming soon!
06/28/24
ApeCast is out on iOS! Search for “ApeCast” on the app store. We are still working through some bugs but ApeComms and 0xResearch, a crypto podcast have been added. Transcripts and summaries works only for 0xResearch for now. For ApeComms we’ve cleaned up the audio a little and uploaded it. In the process of getting it transcribed and summarized.
As you’ll probably realize the app is buggy, so we’ll do another update next week to fix the major issues. Android version will be released with the next update as well. For now we’re keeping this release quiet. We intend on publicizing it when the app is in a much more polished state.
07/11/24
We’ve added the Mocaverse Hall as a podcast as well. The audio was cleaned up to improve the listening experience, and transcriptions/summaries have been posted as well. There were tons of bugs we fixed over the past couple weeks and just submitted a new version to the app store. It should be available in the play store as well within the next few days.
We are still optimizing the app to improve the listening experience. After this update goes live you should be able to search the transcript and play those specific areas. We are working on improving the update pipeline so that episodes are added much more quickly and automate as much as possible. For podcasts this should be easy but for spaces it’ll take a little bit of time because spaces have lots of silence and audio issues that need to be corrected which is a more manual process. We’re building more internal tools to make this process fast.
Interview Q&A: