Podling
A podcast player for iPhone you can talk back to. Say “take a note” and it pauses, listens, and saves your thought as a bookmark on the moment that sparked it.
How a note works
- Listen. Play an episode like you always do.
- Say “take a note”. Playback pauses and a rising tone plays. That’s the cue that Podling is listening.
- Say what you’re thinking. Your iPhone transcribes it with Apple’s on-device speech model, free and offline. A server model, OpenAI Whisper or ElevenLabs Scribe, can act as a backup.
- Say “end note”. The note is saved as a bookmark covering the stretch of the episode just before you spoke (you choose how far back in Settings), so it points at the part that made you think of it.
- Keep listening. Playback resumes where it stopped.
Hands-free, for everything else
Every other command starts with the wake phrase “podling”, so the app only reacts when you mean it. Pause, play, skip ahead, jump back, set the volume or mark an episode as played without touching the phone.
Where your data goes
Your library, bookmarks, audio and transcripts sync to our server, built with Bun, Hono and Postgres. Subscriptions and playback progress also sync through iCloud. Podling has a Live Activity and a Dynamic Island presence, so what’s playing stays in view.
Commands
- “take a note”
- Pauses playback, plays a rising tone and starts listening.
- “end note”
- Saves your note as a bookmark on the stretch of audio just before it, then resumes playback.
- “podling, pause”
- Pauses the episode.
- “podling, play”
- Resumes the episode.
- “podling, next episode”
- Moves to the next episode.
- “podling, go back”
- Jumps back by your skip-back amount, which you set in Settings.
- “podling, volume 40”
- Sets the volume to 40.
- “podling, mark as played”
- Marks the episode as played.
- “podling, skip this”
- Skips what’s playing.
Under the hood
- Transcription
- On the iPhone, with Apple’s on-device speech model. Free and offline.
- Backup transcription
- A server model: OpenAI Whisper or ElevenLabs Scribe.
- Sync server
- Bun, Hono and Postgres. Library, bookmarks, audio and transcripts.
- iCloud
- Subscriptions and playback progress.
- System surfaces
- Live Activity and Dynamic Island.
- Status
- In active development.
Follow Podling
One email when Podling opens for testing or ships. Nothing else.