I really want to love Recast, but the way it condenses content is quite annoying. I love that I can use the sharing sheet in IOS from any webpage, and end up with an audio version of that article in my podcast app. That is the great benefit of Recast .
The problem I have with Recast is that it takes an article and converts it into a condensed version that is presented as if two people were having a conversation about the article.
Here are some of the specific issues I have with the "recasting" of the articles
-When you take an article that is 72 minutes long, and this app it into 8 minutes, my first question is what am I missing from the article. I cannot believe that the original article had that much fluff in it.
The this app is presented at two "Podcast Hosts" (actually AI bots) having a conversation. However when I hear a typical conversation about something, I expect a dialog with differing views. Instead, when one of the bots starts talking, they always start with phrases like absolutely, that’s correct, or some other repetitive affirmative of the other bot. I got tired of hearing the word absolutely. I see no need for having 2 bots having a conversation with identical views. One bot is sufficient
The this app is broken up into segments. I almost expect to hear a commercial break between segments, because of the hard disjointed way they create the segments. The segments are quite disruptive to the listening process
The bots make a lot of statements, that sound like a call to action. I do not think the original articles had a call to action, so why are some bots trying to tell me what to do.
Because of the call to action from the bots, I feel like I am not getting the real voice of the author. I do not know what the author thinks vs what the bot thinks about what the author said
I read a lot of articles, and love to consume my articles in a podcast feed that I create using text to speech. I could only see using this for extremely long articles, (over 1 hour) that I did not really care about what the author actually said, and would settle for a short interpretation of the article.
What could change this to a 5 star app from my perspective would be the ability to use the share sheet to either select a this app of the article, or a direct text to voice translation of the article with all extraneous captions, ads, etc. stripped out