Show HN: InstaPodz – I made this to turn my boring commute into learning session

3 points by AnsenHuang 9 hours ago

I was tired of wasting time in traffic jams every day and wanted to use my commute to learn. I tried finding podcasts on specific topics, like explain MOE like i’m five or the pros and cons of TCA vs. MVVM in SwiftUI, but finding a single episode on niche subjects like these is kinda hard.

I’ve tried tools like NotebookLM, but they require you to manually find and collect all the source material first. I wanted something simpler, that i can just ask a question and get an interesting discussion to listen to.

So I spent the last three months working part-time to build InstaPodz. It's a simple app where you type a question, and it generates a custom podcast episode on that topic for you to listen to.

It's built with - three version of Gemini models - langsmith to handle the tracing and prompt template versioning(it used to make my codebase messy) - backend built with FastAPI on CloudRun (there’re some free credits we can get for new users) - Swift native using SwiftUI and MVVM(I ended up choosing MVVM that I’m familiar with) - TTS is using gpt4o-mini-tts

Happy to discuss/share more if you’re interesting!

The app is in its very early stages(I just launched it last Friday), I would be grateful for any and all feedback on the concept, the quality of the audio, or the user experience. I'm also open to brainstorming or collaborating with anyone who finds the idea interesting.

Thanks for checking it out!