What Podcaster is

Podcaster turns a reading into a podcast episode. You drop in a paper, a chapter or a whole book; two hosts talk you through it in the language you choose; the episode arrives with a set of study notes and a sheet of practice questions made from the same material.

It lives in the menu bar of your Mac and in the browser at podcaster.study, and your library is the same in both. There is no window to keep open: the icon or the page takes the file, a small panel shows the preview and the player, and the rest happens on Podcaster's server while you get on with something else. On a phone or a tablet the browser is the app.

What you get from one reading

The episode. A conversation between two hosts about what the reading says, why it matters and where it is difficult. It is written for listening, not read aloud from the page: the hosts explain, ask each other questions and come back to the hard parts. Length follows the reading and your choice: a short episode is about five minutes, an extended one over half an hour. Chapters in the audio let you skip to a section.

The study notes. A PDF in the same order as the episode: the argument section by section, the terms and their definitions, the key figures, a timeline where the material has one, tables and charts where the reading has numbers, and a short list of what to remember. The answer key to the practice questions is on the last page, printed upside down.

The practice questions. A Word file you can type your answers into, one block per section of the episode, with room for your own working.

What it is good at

Academic readings: journal articles, textbook chapters, lecture notes, a book you have to know by the exam. The hosts adapt to the level of the material: a school text is explained as such, a research paper is treated as one. Scans work: a PDF without a text layer is read by OCR, in English, Dutch or German.

What it is not

It is not a summary tool that reads the abstract back to you, and it is not a substitute for the reading. The episode is a companion: it makes the material click, it does not replace knowing it.

Made by AI, and it says so

Every episode is written and voiced by AI models, and the app tells you so before you make the first one. Models can get things wrong: a date, a number, the direction of an effect. Check anything that matters against the source. See Your files and privacy for what happens to your document and what to keep in mind about copyright.