Context

At Matter, I worked on a handful of features that I would classify as milestones. These features typically had a novel functionality while remaining intuitive for new and casual users. A selection of these is below.

Readable Podcasts

Our first major launch was the ability to transcribe podcasts to text. This gave users the ability to not just read podcasts, but also navigate and annotate their content more precisely. I collaborated with the team to design this feature and edited our demo video, which was filmed by Tyler Appel and Aaron Porter.

See the reception to the video here.

No more randomly skipping around to find a topic, just search the transcript!

Unreal Voices

2023 marked a notable quality increase in text-to-speech, supported by companies like Unreal Speech, OpenAI, and ElevenLabs. We added additional choices of lifelike voices to narrate articles saved to Matter, and I edited a demo video for their launch.

This type of quality is more common now, but at the time this was an exceptional leap forward.

Summarization

With the support of OpenAI’s API, we added a swipe-to-summarize feature to the top of every article. Podcasts also received a chapter breakdown, allowing you to jump around by topic.

This work was made possible by stellar collaborators: Ben Springwater, Sky Lan, Hunter Clarke, Zach Greene, and the rest of the Matter team.