Voilib: Self-Hosted Podcast Search Engine
Voilib indexes podcasts by transcribing them, turning spoken audio into text you can search.
Why this is genuinely different from a podcast client
Podcast apps let you search titles and show notes, which is close to useless when the thing you remember is a sentence somebody said. Voilib transcribes episodes with a speech-to-text model and indexes the transcript, so searching for a phrase returns the episode and the timestamp where it was said.
Local transcription
Transcription runs on your own hardware rather than a cloud API, which keeps both the audio and the resulting text on your machine. The tradeoff is CPU or GPU time: transcribing a back catalogue is a genuinely heavy job, and worth planning around before pointing it at hundreds of hours.
Pairing
It complements rather than replaces a podcast player such as PodFetch or AntennaPod. Voilib is the index; the player is still the player.