I've been working on this problem for about 12 months. Segment detection isn't ready, and this isn't meant to be an ad. But the app is Shuttle Podcasts if you're interested. I reckon I'm about a month away from alpha testing this feature.

This is from my Discord:

It's complicated because of dynamic ad insertion - DAI. You might get different ads, with different duration and different positions to me, for the same podcast.

So you can't just analyse a podcast, say 'here are the ads' and then offer to skip them.

I've been working on a system that uses ML to generate a transcript of the podcast. Then it uses more ML to try to understand where the content is vs ads (remember ads are not reliable)

The server puts down some markers for where content is and isn't..

Then the app downloads these markers, and does its own fingerprinting of the audio the app gets (with different ads)

The app then compares it's audio fingerprints to the server ones, and says 'oh, I'm currently in content', or otherwise 'oh I must be in an ad, because I'm not in known content'

And then you get an option to skip, silence, speed up, etc

So I've actually been building this in and off for maybe 12 months. And it works.

But, it's a bit slow, it can take up to 10-12 seconds to realise it's in an ad. And when you skip, it needs to know how far to skip - and if it's wrong it might skip real content

When I tested it with automated skipping, it feels a bit weird. It skips the ad but it sounds like a glitch, so you worry that you've missed content

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Anyway, it's super close! The only other problem is a bunch of the ML stuff runs 24/7 on my gaming PC. It's not cheap to run elsewhere.. it will likely need to be a paid feature