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Comment by lukaesch | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the hint!

We hit the front page on Hacker News and received many submissions, which led to network errors when fetching some podcasts. I've just added retry logic and scheduling for new podcast fetches and pushed these changes to production.

The Criminal[1] podcast is now added. Due to the current demand, our transcription queue is a bit backed up, so transcription for this podcast will appear in a few days. Please be invited to have a look the next days again.

I'm actively working on securing more GPUs to help scale this process efficiently so in the future you don't have to wait that long.

Would it be interesting if I add e-mail "transcription ready" notifications for those who submit a new podcast?

[1] https://www.audioscrape.com/podcast/criminal

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Oh yah I totally understand the current circumstances, just trying to be helpful in debugging.

I think a notification feature makes a lot of sense, but it depends on how long the wait tends to be. In terms of setting expectations it might be better to display the current backlog and an estimate about when the transcription might be done (though of course both would be even better than either).

Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad to hear you find the notification idea useful. I'm considering displaying the current backlog and estimated completion times as you propose.

How would you expect to get an understanding of the backlog? Would a dedicated page for the entire backlog be helpful, or would you prefer to see which episodes are being transcribed on each podcast page?

Any insights on what would be most helpful for you would be greatly appreciated!

I think there's a range of ways you could communicate it. Kind of depends on the structure of how the backlog gets churned through. Maybe each episode card includes a sigil for the transcript that's either a green circle with a check or a short summary of how long you expect before you process it (6d, 6h, 15m, etc)? That's also kind of busy - maybe you end up putting a single element at the top of the podcast page saying how long before the next episode will be transcribed and perhaps how long before all episodes might be transcribed (i.e. you need to wait at least this X long and probably not longer than Y)?

Having a big central page for all backlogs sounds cool, but I imagine I would probably care about the expected delay for a particular podcast / episode of a podcast most of the time?

Suggestion, you've probably fairly easily got access to how long the most recently completed task took?

Perhaps on the submission form include a low-resolution indication of that, so people's expectations are set before they enter a podcast link? Round it off to the nearest minute/hour/day, and format it appropriately:

"Processing times are currently around 3 hours"

"Processing times are currently around 17 minutes"

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