Questions and answers

Can I turn a PDF into a podcast? Yes, that is what Podcaster does. Drop in a PDF, a Word file (.docx), a PowerPoint (.pptx), an EPUB or plain text, up to 200 MB, and two hosts talk it through as an episode with chapter marks, a transcript and a cover. A scanned PDF is read by OCR first, in English, Dutch or German. See Making an episode.

What do I get besides the episode? Study notes as a PDF, in the order of the episode, and practice questions as a Word file with room to type your answers. The answer key is printed upside down on the last page of the notes. See Study material.

Which languages does it speak? About eighty. English, Dutch and German have hosts tuned by hand.

Can it do a whole book? Yes. A book comes back as a series, one episode per chapter, sharing its artwork. You can also tick only the chapters you need, or give a range of pages.

The chapters it found are wrong. Untick the wrong ones; the episode covers only what is ticked. For a PDF without an outline the headings are guessed from the pages, and a book with unusual formatting can confuse that. Splitting the file into chapters yourself, one file per chapter, always works.

The episode is in the wrong language. The language is a setting under Account, in the Episodes panel (Settings in the Mac app), and it does not follow the file. Set it there; the next episode uses it.

Can I choose the voices? Not one by one. The card you pick on the preview sheet decides who is in the room: Get the gist and Exam practice are two co-hosts, Explain it to me and Go deep a host and a guest. The second voice differs from one reading to the next. See Making an episode.

It got a fact wrong. It happens. Every episode is made by AI models and says so. Check what matters against the reading; the notes and the questions are the quickest way to see what the episode claimed.

How long does it take? A short episode a few minutes, a long one ten to fifteen, a scan longer because every page is read by OCR first. A book as a series takes as long as its episodes together, one after the other.

Where are the files? In your library, tied to your account. On the Mac they come down when you first open them, and the episode's menu opens the notes and the questions and shows the files; in the browser the arrow under an episode downloads all of them in one zip.

Is my document kept? No. It is deleted from the server when the episode is done. See Your files and privacy.

What does it cost? It depends on the reading. The preview sheet shows the figure for the document you dropped in before anything is made. See Account and credit.

Does it work on Windows, a Chromebook, an iPad or a phone? Yes, in the browser at podcaster.study. The web app makes and plays episodes the same way the Mac app does, and the library is tied to your account, so it is the same on every device.