Manchester United approached Tierra to build a podcast player that would compliment the club's commitment to inclusive values. Namely, being able to allow the hard-of-hearing community to understand and search through the information in their official podcast.

The Club's History With The Hard-Of-Hearing Community

This effort is just one step in the club's history with supporting the hard-of-hearing and deaf community. For example, the hugely successful "England Deaf Football" league was formally launched in June 2003 at Manchester United's stadium Old Trafford. In 2008, the club become one of England’s first ‘deaf -friendly’ football clubs, by backing a special campaign launched by the National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS). Deaf ex-United players like Ross McCarthy have trained with sign-language support, competed in mainstream leagues, and earned call-ups to the Great Britain Deaf Team. Lastly, the club offer hearing loops at Old Trafford's Ticket Office.

Building The Web App

After a few test runs, where we showed Manchester United the speed of which we can generate podcast transcripts for them and the detail that these transcripts provide in terms of metadata, the club and Tierra decided to automate this process into a web app that fans of the podcast, particularly those in the hard of hearing community, could use to listen/watch the podcast on.

We embarked on creating this web app for the club, first sending low-fidelity designs over to the club's Content staff. Following feedback, we iterated the designs until all parties were happyh with the look and feel of this new podcast playing experience.

We then built both the backend and the frontend of this podcast player. The first challenge of ours was to automate transcription generation for new episodes of the podcast. We did this by connecting with a podcast RSS feed library, and regularly running checks for new episodes.

Once published, the episode would feed directly into our AI transcription service. Following this, a transcription would be generated, replete with metadata that was vital for creating the interactive experience available through this platform.

The podcast player we built played episodes of "The Official Manchester United Podcast" alongside their corresponding transcripts. The player we built wouldn't just display all the words of the episode - it would highlight a word in bold whilst they were being spoken.

After a few podcast episodes had been released in this format, it was clear that the hard of hearing community greatly appreciated and lauded Manchester United's decision to create a podcast player specifically for their community.

The act of highlighting words as they are being spoken was something that was incredibly innovative at the time; Apple Podcasts and Spotify Podcasts had not yet built thos feature yet, or had at least not yet made it available publicly.

Soon after launch, Manchester United Editorial staff decided that they would like to edit some of the words of the transcription; using A.I. always runs the risk of mistakes, even if they are sparse. We then built an invite-only editing suite, allowing the club's internal team to edit words inside transcripts at any moment.

Our editing features extended to being able to add multiple words within one time stamp. Staff at Manchester United could add comments in parentheses, or otherwise correctly spell words or phrases.

The next iteration of the product involved the transcription being able to assist listeners, especially those who were hard of hearing, in understanding who was speaking and when. We built a host editing feature, which allowed the club's internal staff to teach the A.I. who the hosts were were through initial training, which then allowed the A.I to match the patterns of the voice so that the host recognition was consistent throughout.

The next iteration came in the form of allowing the hard of hearing listeners or readers to have a better experience in delineating the various sections of the podcast. In close collaboration with the club, we built the ability for internal staff to add in sections of non-transcribed text in between any section, sentence, or word of the podcast transcript.

We built this with a great degree of flexibility, including adding a WYSIWYG editor that could apply not only to non-transcript words, but the transcript words too. The end result of this was a podcast playing experience that exceeded all others at the time in terms of interactivity, and information collection/retrieval.

We built a search feature that allowed that allowed users, even those who were not in the hard of hearing community, to search through a podcast and find the parts or the keywords that they were looking for. This in itself was a monumental leap forward from the standard at the time, where popular podcast players only had basic play/pause/rewind functionality, and the metadata would be limited to episode titles and descriptions.