Quickly Summarize Podcasts on Your iPhone

Drowning under a mountain of podcasts to listen to on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac? Here’s a simple, free solution to summarize your episodes and sort through them quickly. You’ll be able to decide whether a full listen is worth your time or not.

Overcast — the best podcast app

To start, I recommend the podcast player Overcast . It’s particularly effective for organization. Personally, I use Spotify to discover new podcasts, then subscribe via Overcast for listening. Overcast offers great features like audio enhancement and silence removal. I also really like the ability to create smart playlists by theme.

The downside is that over time, you accumulate so many subscriptions that it becomes hard to keep up with everything. Plus, even though I enjoy some English-language podcasts, it can be difficult to follow them if I’m not completely focused.

Shortcuts — the indispensable automation app on iOS

The solution I’m proposing lets you generate a transcript of the podcast. You can then use that transcript however you like. Personally, I use it to create a summary so I can quickly identify which episodes are worth listening to in full.

Here’s how to do it:

Overcast lets you export the audio file of an episode via the “share” button. You can then send it to Apple’s Shortcuts app.

Here’s the detail of the shortcut to use: it simply contains the “Transcribe” step. The podcast audio file serves as the input, and the transcript is the output. In my case, I then send the transcript to another shortcut to generate a summary with AI, but you can use it in all sorts of ways.

This trick lets you clear out your podcast list and better understand foreign-language content, all for free thanks to transcription done directly on your phone.

I’ve tested this method with podcasts of around an hour without any issues. There’s probably a size limit somewhere, but I haven’t hit it yet.