# Current Challenges and Future Directions in Podcast Information Access

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09227 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09227/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [PODTILE: Facilitating Podcast Episode Browsing with Auto-generated Chapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16148/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Podcast Recommendations with Profile-Aware LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08777/) (2025)
- [Topic Modeling on Podcast Short-Text Metadata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04419/) (2022)
- [VoxRAG: A Step Toward Transcription-Free RAG Systems in Spoken Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17326/) (2025)
- [Topic Model Robustness to Automatic Speech Recognition Errors in Podcast Transcripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12306/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Speaker Diarization that is Agnostic to Language, Overlap-Aware, and Tuning Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12504/) (2022)
- [Listening Between the Lines: Decoding Podcast Narratives with Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05310/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Podcasts are spoken documents across a wide-range of genres and styles, with growing listenership across the world, and a rapidly lowering barrier to entry for both listeners and creators. The great strides in search and recommendation in research and industry have yet to see impact in the podcast space, where recommendations are still largely driven by word of mouth. In this perspective paper, we highlight the many differences between podcasts and other media, and discuss our perspective on challenges and future research directions in the domain of podcast information access.