Castbox: Giving users a voice with Google Cloud
About Castbox
Founded in 2016, Castbox provides an application that enables users to locate, access, and create spoken audio content. The application, available on iOS and Android, supports 50 million podcasts, on-demand radio programs, and audiobooks in 70 languages from 175 countries.
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Contact usWith Google Cloud and Firebase, Castbox operates a highly scalable spoken audio content platform with intelligent features such as in-audio search and curated podcast recommendations.
Google Cloud results
- Helps provide an in-audio search capability with more than 96% speech-to-text accuracy and 10 millisecond latency on queries
- Allows the business to warehouse and analyze data growing by 30 GB per day
- Enables the business to customize its application, including creating its own content, based on user feedback
Supporting 50K concurrent connections
Demand for spoken audio content such as podcasts remains robust despite the proliferation of video services and other entertainment options for consumers. Shibin Li, Co-founder of Castbox, credits growth of the global podcast platform to the following: speed and availability, market-leading features, the proliferation of smart devices to deliver audio content, and activities — such as driving and working around the house — that make consuming video difficult.
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Beijing, China, Castbox enables users to locate, access, and create spoken audio content. Available on iOS and Android, Castbox supports 50 million podcasts, on-demand radio programs, and audiobooks in 70 languages from 175 countries. The platform hosts about 2 million users per day and is the largest podcast platform on Android.
Castbox includes a range of features that build on its core service to provide a high-quality user experience. These features include curated podcast recommendations and in-audio search.
A combination of services
At its inception, Castbox relied on a combination of a multinational cloud services, as well as Google Cloud services, including the Google BigQuery analytics data warehouse and Cloud APIs to provide programmatic interfaces with Google Cloud services, and a range of services from the Google mobile development platform Firebase.
However, as Castbox matured and its user base expanded, the business increased its reliance on Google Cloud and Firebase. “We needed to access stable cloud services as we could not tolerate long periods of downtime that would compromise the user experience,” says Li. “Furthermore, we had to support up to 50,000 concurrent connections, and potentially more in future, without disruption.”
“Based on our analysis of the data in Google BigQuery, we can determine what type of content users are listening to, how long they like to listen to it, and when they like to listen to it. This allows us to recommend similar podcasts to each user based on the preferences he or she expressed, encouraging activity on and return visits to our platform.”
—Shibin Li, Co-Founder, CastboxCompetitive differentiation
Castbox also found machine learning-powered Google Cloud APIs could help deliver features, such as in-audio search, that differentiate the podcast platform from its competitors. In addition, Firebase SDKs and Firebase A/B Testing would enable Castbox to create and analyze new applications, as well as make adjustments based on user feedback. Firebase Realtime Database would allow the business to support tens of thousands of concurrent user connections.
The diligence of the Google Cloud team in advising Li and her team about forthcoming products and services also swayed Castbox towards Google technologies. The business gained the opportunity with Google to join several programs that offered early access to Google innovations.
Signature in-audio search service
Castbox now uses Google Cloud services in the Tokyo, Japan, and U.S. East regions. Cloud Speech-to-Text API plays a key role in delivering Castbox’s signature in-audio search service. This service enables users to search transcriptions of audio content on the platform for words or phrases. The search results incorporate the title of the podcast and the search term in context (for example, within the sentence or sentence excerpt in which it appears). Each use of the word or phrase is time-stamped so it can easily be found. The API enables Castbox developers to apply neural network algorithms to achieve audio-to-text conversion accuracy rates of greater than 96%, while search queries typically experience latency of just 50 milliseconds.
In addition, the latency of comparison data, converting audio to text, is only about 250 milliseconds, contributing to the processing of about 12 minutes worth of audio to text in just 10 minutes. “We can process about 20 hours of audio files in one day,” Li says. “This enables us to transcribe and index all the new episodes of a podcast in that period.”
50,000 concurrent connections
With Firebase Realtime Database, Castbox now supports up to 50,000 concurrent connections to its platform with an average latency per connection of just 10 milliseconds. “Firebase Realtime Database also allows us to continue operating in offline mode, which is extremely helpful if we experience any network disruptions,” Li explains. “When we come back online again, any data is simply synchronized with the database.”
Google BigQuery and the analytics capabilities of Firebase SDKs also enable Castbox to monitor and analyze user behaviors. “Based on our analysis of the data in Google BigQuery, we can determine what type of content users are listening to, how long they like to listen to it, and when they like to listen to it,” Li explains. “This allows us to recommend similar podcasts to each user based on the preferences he or she expressed, encouraging activity on and return visits to our platform.”
“Given our queries may span up to 40 days of data, we may be analyzing up to 1,200 GB at one time. We have no problem doing this with Google BigQuery.”
—Shibin Li, Co-Founder, CastboxCastbox also uses its analyses of Google BigQuery data to amend banners and summaries on its platform to encourage users to listen to additional content. Furthermore, the service is prepared to make surprise recommendations of content to users based on the preferences and reactions of users with similar tastes.
“We analyze a pool of data growing at up to 30 GB per day,” Li explains. “Given our queries may span up to 40 days of data, we may be analyzing up to 1,200 GB at one time. We have no problem doing this with Google BigQuery.” These analyses also support Castbox’s decision to start creating original content, such as finance and economic news, for its platform.
Checking weekly changes
Castbox does not rely only on analyzing user data to deliver a high-quality experience. The business aggregates user feedback from emails and Google Play reviews to make weekly changes to its platform. It then uses Firebase A/B Testing to check whether these changes are met with a positive user response.
“We are extremely pleased with Google Cloud and Firebase. We have been able to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and provide an attractive option for users at a time when content and entertainment options are exploding. We have a great opportunity with Google to continue to improve the value of our offering to users and build engagement and loyalty.”
—Shibin Li, Co-Founder, CastboxCastbox’s positive experiences with Google Cloud are encouraging the business to grow its use of the product. “We are trying to move some more services to Google Cloud because it is very stable and scalable,” Li says. The business is keen to explore the capabilities of Cloud Pub/Sub to provide low latency messaging between applications, Cloud Spanner to deliver a distributed relational database service, and Cloud Dataflow to transform and enrich data in stream and batch modes.
“We are extremely pleased with Google Cloud and Firebase,” Li concludes. “We have been able to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and provide an attractive option for users at a time when content and entertainment options are exploding. We have a great opportunity with Google to continue to improve the value of our offering to users and build engagement and loyalty.”
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About Castbox
Founded in 2016, Castbox provides an application that enables users to locate, access, and create spoken audio content. The application, available on iOS and Android, supports 50 million podcasts, on-demand radio programs, and audiobooks in 70 languages from 175 countries.