MIXTAPE - The Podcast Search Engine

Podcasts have seen in the recent years a steady increase in numbers, both in terms of listeners and content providers. Apple reported in 2018 over 550,000 active podcast channels, with over 18.5 million episodes in over 100 languages worldwide. With so many resources available, finding the podcast episodes to listen to is one of the main issues that listeners face. The problem is that podcasts are generally organised in lists and catalogues for listeners to subscribe to, or they are sorted based on popularity. In MIXTAPE we aim to improve the way podcasts are searched by allowing listeners to find content based on topics of interest. For the first time it will be possible to find individual podcast episodes based on your preferences and precise interests. To enable this we will be using speech processing and natural language understanding adding these key components to our existing content management platform.