The Podcast Search Engine

ended

Podcasts have seen in the recent years a steady increase in numbers, both in terms of listeners and content providers. In spite of their increasing popularity there are currently no effective ways of finding podcasts based on specific interests (i.e. keywords or more complex queries) and we understand that now is the right moment to innovate this area. With this proposal and the work to be done by the Innovation Associate (IA) we want to solve the problem of podcast discovery by providing the first advanced search service for podcast content that leverages the state of the art machine learning and data analysis techniques in order to analyse and index podcast content. In this way we enable for the first time the listeners to find and discover the content that matches their topic of interest and allow them to create Podcast Mixtapes for the different situations (similar to traditional cassette mixtapes). Our ambition is to become the reference search engine for podcasts (i.e the “Google” for podcasts). The IA that will develop further our company’s content analysis capabilities and include speech processing and natural language understanding in our content platform with a dedicated application use case around search of podcast content. These are key enabling technologies for future media-rich applications, like the ones developed by our company and therefore we need an experienced researcher in this field to trigger the next generation of product innovation on our side. The IA will also be at the core of the exploration of the innovation idea, guiding it as an innovation project towards an exploitable market product. The company is able to provide the IA with training in the area of web software development and operations (DevOps), a very sought after skill in the labour market. Moreover, by working with an innovation driven SME, the IA will gain very valuable insights into business aspects and commercial innovation management.