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AI · alternatives · 2026

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24 alternatives to BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT

I'm a big fan of the BBC podcast In Our Time -- and (like most people) I've been playing with the OpenAI APIs. In Our Time has almost 1,000 episodes on everything from Cleopatra to the evolution of teeth to plasma physics, all still available, so it's my starting point to learn about most topics. But it's not well organised. So here are the episodes sorted by library code. It's fun to explore. Web scraping is usually pretty tedious, but I found that I could send the minimised HTML to GPT-3 and get (almost) perfect JSON back: the prompt includes the Typescript definition. At the same time I…

This tool organizes nearly 1,000 episodes of the BBC podcast "In Our Time" using Dewey Decimal classification system. The episodes cover diverse topics from history and science to specialized subjects like plasma… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1SP

    Hey, we're Phil and Ian, the founders of Scribbler. We're huge podcast fans, but found we never had enough time to soak it all in. So, we built Scribbler - a tool that leverages GPT to condense podcast episodes into bite-sized summaries for when life's too busy. Now, we can catch the best bits from any episode, discover new shows, and best of all, stop wasting valuable time figuring out what's worth listening to and what's not. We hope you'll find it useful!

    2023 · app.scribbler.so · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hey HN! I love finding new books to read on here. I wanted to gather the most mentioned books and recreate the serendipity of physical browsing. I scraped 20k comments from HN threads related to reading, extracted the references and opinions using GPT-4o mini, and visualised their embeddings as a map. - OpenAI's embeddings were processed using UMAP and HDBSCAN. A direct 2D projection from the text embeddings didn't yield visually interesting results. Instead, HDBSCAN is first applied on a high-dimensional projection. Those clusters tend to correspond to different genres. The genre…

    2024 · hnbooks.pieterma.es · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hi HN, wanted to share a project that I’ve been working on recently. PodText allows users to find anything said on a podcast. You can also listen and share clips to a specific part of the podcast audio, simply by highlighting the text of that part. Currently there are just over 25k podcast episodes and I’m adding a lot more in the coming weeks (yes my GPU bill is painful). In order to monetize it, I’m building a sponsorship database to help sponsors find podcasts and vice versa. This will be sold in the form of a $99/month “PodText Business” subscription. I bet I could charge a lot more…

    2023 · podtext.ai · its alternatives →

  4. 4IW

    The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…

    Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    A podcast about data, science, stories, and time.

    2016 · heavybit.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6
  7. 7

    Take your podcast to the next level

    2023 · subhashpal.gumroad.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    The fastest way to know more

    2025 · bubble.io · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Turn YT videos with chapters into courses & track progress

    2023 · chapters-queue.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Podcast history

    2015 · soundcloud.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Doing math with Python

    2016 · pythonpodcast.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Podcast about the intangible forces that shape our behavior

    2015 · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Episode about writing MUDs in Python with Evennia

    2015 · pythonpodcast.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Data/Stats/ML podcast with a great Mini series

    2015 · dataskeptic.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    4000 years of history in an entertaining format.

    2016 · podcasthistoryofourworld.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Scientific evidence that podcasts are good for your brain

    2016 · freakonomics.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    A podcast of Oxford-style debates on complex topics

    2015 · intelligencesquaredus.org · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    "take a mind-bending journey into the science of time"

    2016 · startalkmedia.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Python Headlines delivered directly to your earbuds

    2017 · pythonbytes.fm · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Bringing ‘A Brief History of Time’ to a whole new generation

    2016 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Python Headlines delivered directly to your earbuds

    2017 · pythonbytes.fm · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    After 30 months and 50 episodes, this host reflects...

    2015 · problogger.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    I built a pipeline that turns tweets about ML papers into a podcast. Code's up here. Happy hacking. https://github.com/yacineMTB/scribepod

    2023 · scribepod.substack.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Podcast summaries using GPT.

    2023 · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →