Overcast says its Smart Speed feature has saved me 30 hours (over the last ~5 months), so I expect it to save me 100 hours within a year. It is especially useful for podcasts and language learning material with a lot of pauses, but I have become used to it, and so I now keep it enabled for most audiobooks that I load into Overcast just to get the dynamic playback speed.
I'm at 173 hours! I've liked Overcast (I've been a premium customer for two years), but I find myself wishing it has better features now. It feels like it was the best a couple years ago but hasn't done much since. Smart Speed is the one thing that has kept me from switching to something else so far.
296 hours myself. I have also been pleased with Overcast until just recently. Now that I am stuck at home, I went from listening to all my podcasts from my phone to listening to most of them from my computer. Overcast's lack of desktop app and pretty poor web interface are causing me to consider switching for the first time.
I don't love its web interface. But its ability to do the smartspeed thing + sync the played status to my phone for when I move from my desk to walking the dogs has been enough to stave off the switch for me.
I haven't yet spent much time researching alternatives. One podcast I used to listen to is now a Spotify exclusive. I use that to stream music and I really like how their desktop and mobile apps work together. I was thinking of giving them a try for podcasts until I realized it didn't seem possible to import an RSS feed. That would eliminate the ability to listen to Patreon supported podcasts which is a deal breaker for me.
When software grows I notice there can be a lot of dev done on features I don't end up using. I don't use CarPlay, watch, Smart Speed, Voice Boost, or playlists.
Last year it looks it launched a sharing interface with what looks like a non-trivial backend to it. In January, a rewrite of Voice Boost and support for Air Play 2 was released. So it's pretty actively developed.
What kind of features do you think is lacking? I feel like I have very simple needs. The only time I've wanted for something is occasionally wishing to use it on my desktop and the web interface is okay-ish for those brief periods.
Based on my observations and the details that Marco has blogged about, it seems to use a silence-detection algorithm that rapidly adjusts playback speed, so the silences are not cut out in a jarring manner, but rather played through at a typical 2.5-4x.
Maybe this will be unpopular, but I feel like speeding up podcasts is really disrespectful to the creator. It'd be incredibly rude to tell someone in real life that they're talking too slow, and in my opinion this is the same thing. Podcasts don't need to be so transactional.
It definitely isn't the same thing. I kinda understand why you think that way, but it's pretty much completely illogical (see avoiding ever skim reading anything written by someone, or never fast forwarding any filmed media where a person is speaking).
