Digital Products I Wish Existed
- Enqueuer for spaced repetition
- Digital housekeeping
- Audio search
- Richer web browsing
- Save podcast clips for later
Enqueuer for spaced repetition
Let’s say I saved a couple of podcast clips and articles about a topic that I have been studying. I would benefit a lot from revisiting selected parts of that content periodically.
Nowadays, one must go through the hassles of creating flash cards in Anki.
Isn’t it possible to make that process smoother? Enqueuing (and then surfacing) content within spaced repetition tools should be easier.
Projects and startups to watch:
- Orbit (GitHub) by Andy Matuschak
Some of his public updates at Patreon: Bringing ideas into your Orbit (a), Big milestone today: generic embeddable prompts (a), “Skip”: exponential-backoff deferral mechanisms and fuzzy inboxes (a)
Sep 2020
Digital housekeeping
As knowledge workers spend decades using computers, clutter inevitably accumulates. It goes from scattered documents across a Downloads folder to tons of unanswered emails inside Gmail.
Over the years all this clutter becomes a burden, a source of anxiety and guilt.
There should exist a good way to do “spring cleaning” in digital systems.
Sep 2020
Audio search
Podcasts have been part of the mainstream for some years now. How come it is still so hard to search audio? It is 2020 and we cannot Google a phrase and check in which episodes the phrase was said.
It seems like the bottleneck is in speech-to-text models — automated transcripts are still not good enough. Will that change anytime soon?
Sep 2020
Richer web browsing
It seems that the web browser has stagnated. Two decades later, are tabs really the end-of-line? Isn’t innovation still possible in the browser layer?
Email, which is even older than the browser, has got its fair share of recent innovation with Superhuman and HEY.
Isn’t it possible bring some fresh air to the browser?
A few ideas —
- Integrate the context: Am I on search mode or on procrastination mode? Exploring or focused?
- Overlay relevant metadata into pages you visit. Genius and others have tried (archive) in the past. Hypothesis and Fermat’s Library seem too niche. Can’t we see what HN or Reddit say about a page?
- Recommend me stuff that you, browser, know I like spending time with. Tiktok and YouTube, but for websites.
Projects and startups to watch:
Aug 2020
Save podcast clips for later
Just like we bookmark webpages or “save them for later” with Pocket, we should be able to save a clip of a podcast, say 30-120 seconds, and easily refer back to it.
Airr starts to implement this, but (as of August 2020) it is not as polished as I would expected for a product (transcripts need to be requested, they are not automatic, the UI is still a bit rough, etc).
A way to kickstart adoption is to create short clips that include subtitles (transcripts) and that are shareable by podcast creators themselves – e.g. these videos.
A next step would be to integrate the library of clips into some kind of remixed playlist – one that could find into a spaced repetition routine.
Projects and startups to watch:
Aug 2020
