Podcast Summarization - A journey through sound

Podcasts are audio files that are generated by speakers and made available over the internet for streaming or download to listeners. Podcasts have become increasingly popular as a source of entertainment and information. Some podcast shows release new episodes on a regular schedule (daily, weekly, etc.); others irregularly. Some podcast shows feature short episodes of 5 minutes or less touching on one or two topics; others may release 3+ hour long episodes touching on a wide range of topics. Some are structured as news delivery, some as conversations, some as storytelling.The automated creation of podcast audio summaries is proposed to aid in content discovery and help listeners quickly preview podcast content before investing time in listening to an entire episode. The goal is to enhance the user experience, making podcast content accessible to a wider audience by providing key insights of the podcast as audio summaries in the user’s preferred language. The proposed system first transcribes the audio from a podcast using automatic speech recognition (ASR), then summarizes the transcript using abstractive text summarization, and finally returns the audio associated with the text summary in a language of the user’s choice.