A mobile listening experience
Playback, downloads, a personal library, episode discovery, and precise clip controls, connected through one interface on iPhone and Android.
Annotated / A ByteTalk product
Keep the ideas
worth hearing.
Annotated is a podcast app for iPhone and Android with optional detected-ad skipping, listening guides, searchable transcripts, and notes that stay connected to the audio.
Explore Annotated- Platforms
- iPhone · Android
- Design & development
- Alan Shiflett
Product strategy, UX & engineering - Scope
- Mobile app, web & audio infrastructure
The product problem
A good thought
deserves a timestamp.
A useful idea can disappear into an hour-long episode. Finding it again means scrubbing through audio. A note in another app loses the source and timestamp that made it useful.
I built Annotated to keep the moment, the thought, and the source together. Listeners can search a transcript, select up to 90 seconds of audio, add a private or public note, and return to the original passage. Listening guides organize long episodes, and optional ad skipping moves past detected sponsor breaks.
Inside the experience
From listening
to remembering.
Three current iPhone screens, one continuous listening experience.
Pick up where you left off.
A Today screen brings the queue and recent episodes together. The player stays within reach as listeners explore.
Skip the interruption.
When a listening guide has identified ad and sponsor segments, the player can move past them automatically. Listeners stay in control and can turn the setting off.
Save the moment and the thought.
Set the start and end of a clip, preview it, add a tag, then save the note privately or share it with the source attached.
What I built
The product
behind the player.
Automatic guides and ad detection
Guide generation can be enabled per show. The pipeline transcribes new episodes, builds listening guides, and identifies sponsor reads and ad breaks.
Playback that skips detected ads
When automatic ad skipping is enabled, playback jumps past the guide’s detected ad segments. Listeners can turn it off in playback settings.
A connected web product
The app sits alongside Annotated’s browser extension and public annotation feed, extending the same idea from web content to podcasts.
Have an app in mind?
I can help shape the experience, build the app, and connect the systems behind it.