Podcast tooling & product review: Descript

Welcome product people. We are here again for our Product Bakery podcast. I'm with Christian. Hi, Christian. Hi, Alex. And yeah, we ended our last episode a little bit abruptly, which yeah, I hope it wasn't too bad. But at the same time, we did mention a couple of things during the episodes that I think are interesting to pick up today. Christian, we talked about the idea to have like product reviews and we talked about tooling and we didn't really deep dive on tooling for the podcast. So why not sharing a little bit more about the tools that we use on a daily basis in order to get this podcast out of the door and to have a look at the products to really look like, how did they build them? What is nice? What do we love every time we have to use them? What do we hate every time we have to use them? And to share a little bit more around that process. Yeah, I love it. And I'm a big fan of your idea of having product reviews. So I'm not sure if we should talk about all of them or maybe pick just one and go deeper, but my favorite tool at the moment. Let's name them. Let's name them all. Let's just lay out what we use and then we can talk about our favorites. I think that makes sense because then at least we give the whole picture. Yeah, absolutely. I think number one is Anchor, where we distribute and manage all our episodes. And then number two, we record with Zencaster, which especially now with COVID times, doing most of the recordings remote is a lifesaver because it records on your local machine, means that even if a computer connection is bad, we don't lose any files. We still have them there. And at the end of the recording, I can simply download all of them and put them together, which brings us to tool number three. Just for everyone to understand. So it gets recorded locally, but uploads them to the server once you're done, which means in case you have an internet connection issue in between, you don't lose any quality on the recording, which is amazing. And the uploading is simultaneously, right? So you're not waiting for hours to upload. We, I'm not sure if we want to deep dive on Zencaster, but they also recently did a redesign and added a lot of functionalities. So if we don't touch on it, feel free to check it out. It's definitely a cool tool and a fun tool to use. It also comes with video and video recording. And it also has a very nice recovery function in case someone is just dropping out early of the call because he or she thinks we are done because we said goodbye, but we didn't press the stop button. We can argue if it's a nice function. It works, but it's a workaround. If you need to write recovery in a URL that you use for the recording, that's less of a feature and more of a, I don't know, is it's yeah. I don't know. I think they could have made it a little bit more explicit to help people actually save their files without having to spend time on Google. Fair point. Good. Tool number three is Audition. Yeah. Thanks to our Adobe friends, easy and full-fledged audio editing software. That's where we combine the different audio tracks where we optimize EQ, the audio, and where we then export our final track, including our beautiful intro music and shout out here to Epidemic Music. And if we do shout outs, we're not affiliated to any of those guys. Not yet. We use them because we like them. It's not any sort of advertisement. It's more around really sharing the products and tools and the process that we follow. But since we're agile, we don't want to exclude potential partnerships. Hashtag no advertisement. But yeah, that brings us also to the next tool. Once we have the audio lines combined and optimized, then we put it into a tool called Descript. And Descript is an amazing transcription tool because it does many things. So first of all, it transcribes the whole episode. Then you can say, remove all the filling words, like all the amps or all the, I think, or, you know, or whatever people say when they just talk randomly, randomly. I think we need to cut that out. No, it's a very nice tool and it's working with an AI. So I think we haven't done it now, but what you can do with Descript is, as a user, it can understand and learn your voice, and you can just remove a word and rename it. For example, I could say, instead of this house is blue, I could rename the word into red, and then Descript will speak the word red in my language, which is super amazing. Yeah. And it makes a lot of fun working with it. It feels like black magic for sure. Yeah. It's pretty scary when I first heard of it. I didn't believe something like that exists or is possible, but yeah, technology is just developing way too fast. But we can change the voice or from other people, so we're not misusing it. And we're also sending the episodes always to our interviewees before we launch it. Yeah. Yeah. This means we come out of Descript, we upload the file to Anchor, which we already mentioned. From Anchor, it then gets published. Anchor also has this nice function that it's, again, transcribes the version and gives you small video snippets that we use in our social media channels that we share. And we then create the landing page for every episode where we use Squarespace. So also here, why did we pick Squarespace? There would have been a lot of different solutions. I think for us here, the most important was to be fast. No code. I have so many projects laying around where I wanted to code something, and I just never finished them because either I'm not happy with it or I want to try different technologies and so on. So luckily here, we used that then, Christian. And yeah, so just to use a solution that pretty much allows us to go live within a day. And that's how we pushed the whole website out. Did you watch the manga show Dragon Ball Z? Yes. Do you remember when Goku was training and he was moving into this room where one day inside is one year? So inside it's one year, but outside just one day passes. So that would be something for you to finish your projects. And you can become super strong as well. That would be amazing. Guys, stay tuned. I have so many projects that I want to have you all see, but yeah, it will take some years. You want to launch a new phone, new hardware, you want to rebuild Apple. So just take some time and Alex will get there. But I think one last thing for our chat today is also to share the process behind all these tools and how we interact. Because I just recently had a chat with a podcasting friend and he asked me, Hey Christian, you're launching twice a week. How are you doing this? Are you outsourcing your work or are you taking it up by yourself? And yeah, I think it's actually straightforward whenever we record something. It's just about having the right tools. I mean, it sounds like a lot, especially naming them. I felt we would be faster and we're ready and then it's in for nine minutes. Like literally, how long does it take to do a whole episode? Like one hour of recording and then maybe one hour each of post-production? Yeah. One and a half? One and a half, I would say. But the thing is also the way we organize ourselves. Let's say we have done an interview with someone. What we do is right afterwards you put the audio lines together. While you're doing that, I'm creating an anchor and the landing page on our website, as well as the podcasting tool and start already adding an introduction, description, et cetera. Once you have finalized pulling the audio together, I start cutting it in the script while you adding the table of content and the podcast description. And then we're almost done. We could eventually launch without a landing page, which would save us maybe another half an hour. But yeah, we love doing it and we're also happy to see the comments from our audience. And that's all the magic. Yeah, absolutely. So let's jump to the product review because I think I would love to have a closer look at Descript. I know you're a big fan of it. I was completely blown away when I saw what they offer and how it works. What do you think was the job to be done that they were trying to solve? Wow. I think they want to help people just to make cutting as easy as possible, to keep it short. Yeah. Because it is just one click and all the filling words are removed. And in, I would say 90% of the cases, you don't need to do anything anymore. But I think it's not only about that. The filling words is beautiful functionality, but at the end, I think that's like the cherry on top because I think what they do is like pretty much they give you a tool that allows everyone who's not audiophile or whatsoever to edit the podcast or a video and so on. It just makes cutting so much easier because it removes you from, let's say the word of audio editing, where you see like all these lines going up and down. I have no idea how to describe them. And it gives you something that's very natural to all of us, which is text. And I can read what has been said and I can directly interact and edit the text that I'm seeing. I can delete phrases that shouldn't be there. I can delete words that shouldn't be there. I can delete filler words. It even helps me detect those filler words. So I think it's like really making audio editing more natural, but we can do something. Let's go to the script. Let's see how they phrase it on their website. And while you're looking up the website, I think the big benefit next to the whole cutting part is the transcription in itself. Because transcription tools are also maybe not easy to find and not all of them are good. I just looked a little bit into it and I realized what I'm getting out of the script is already quality stuff. I'm on their website now. I love their hero. Don't share that yet. Make a good first with that script. Okay. I think I like the line. It's catchy. Still, it doesn't really explain what it is. I'm not sure if I would stay on the page without knowing them, but then the next section solves that. And so the way they described themselves is that they say the script is a collaborative audio video editor that works like a doc. It includes transcription, a screen recorder, publishing, full multitrack editing, and some mind bending useful AI tools. And I think this, here we come a little bit back to, yeah, maybe I like the job to be done that we tried to explain. So it's really about editing in the same way, like he would edit a document. And I think what's also worth highlighting is that it's much more powerful than what we actually use. Because as we mentioned, we are using Adobe Audition for the multitrack editing, for the audio improvements and so on. It all comes with the script. So I think in theory, you could use it as a full blown solution. Nevertheless, and maybe that's not fair because we haven't really tried it. But still, I feel like I have more possibilities to use a tool like Audition for the real editing. While I tend to use the script for what makes them unique, which is like this transcription and text editing kind of tool. But there's also one thing that I'm really missing in the script. And I hope maybe some of the product managers listening in right now, because sometimes you have some briefings and sometimes they're just annoying. And what I do is I go into Audition to cut them out, sometimes just manually, because in the script it would be pain in the ass. So if they would launch a feature to lower the breathing voice as well, somehow, I don't know how, but I think their AI must be powerful enough meanwhile. So maybe they can do something around there. Maybe they can and we just didn't find it yet. If so, then please drop us a comment or an email and help us out to reduce breathing noises. I'm just looking at their feature. They even have remote recording. So yeah, you could literally use them for everything. Collaboration, publishing, they even have publishing on it. So what's your overall feedback on the script? Love the concept. Again, it's unique. It's disruptive, if I'm still allowed to use that word. We haven't used it often. No, we don't. But I feel like it's so overused. I think I would guess that they use some tools. I don't think they wrote their own transcription tool. So I think they smartly use a lot of different services off the shelf and that they created an incredible tool. What else should I say? Let's say at this level, while I open the script in the background, you can tell me what you think about it. I'm a big fan. I would recommend it to everyone if you want to get started with the podcast, because it's definitely a time saver. And if you don't want to go into audition and just want to keep it as lean as possible, just running the filter of the filling words over it is already like worth of saving, let's say at least half an hour of time. So, yep, I like it. And what has blown me away back then was definitely the sales pitch video they have on their website. So the video back then was blowing me away. And actually the main reason why I just wanted to have it. So also sales wise, they were doing a good job and highly recommended. So, yeah, now in the script and I'm looking at the functionalities, there is a lot. And I think, so maybe overall, I think I sometimes feel like the interface is not entirely straightforward. That's why, yeah, I think we definitely miss out on a lot of great functionalities. One thing that I really hate is obviously the way it is like a web app that they show that you can install. It always gives you this restart to install a new version, which is pretty much like every day. And even if you haven't, even if the app is closed and you still ask it to restart it for to install the new version. Yeah. But I don't know, should we give, we still need to think about it. Should we give it an award or a rating? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Then we should take one more closer look on the things that we don't like, because something that's annoying to me sometimes is once you're editing and you're cutting something out, it takes two or three seconds until I can press the next block that I want to edit. So it's overall quite slow sometimes. Since I have having a new MacBook, it got a little bit better, but I would expect it to be much more fluent. Okay. Let's close it with a one to five rating. For me, the concept is five stars. The interface is three. I mean, it lands somewhere at a four altogether, counting in like also speeds that you mentioned and so on. We didn't study a proper evaluation metrics, right? Yeah, we are random users, which is absolutely fine. So my rating, very short, 3.7. Have you ever rated something on Amazon with 3.7? No, but you see the average rating, which is sometimes 3.7. But give it a full star. You need to give it a full star. Okay. It will get the four. Okay. Perfect. Then with that, let's thank them. Thanks Descript for providing us with this beautiful tool. Happy customers. Please fix the bugs and requests. Yesterday. All right. With that said, Christian, enjoy the evening. We are happy to hear your feedback and thoughts on this episode. Amazing. Bye everyone. Bye.