Making our podcast findable
Metal Magic FTC Team #23362 runs the first FTC interview podcast in the Chesapeake region. The advice was great, but it was trapped inside videos. This site sets it free.
Why we built this
We sit down with other teams and pull out the practical stuff: how they designed a mechanism, how they organized their season, and what they’d do differently next time.
The catch is that search engines can’t listen to video. So we turned every episode into text you can search, read, and link to.
What you can do here
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Full transcripts
Every episode, readable and searchable. Good for accessibility and for search engines.
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Ask the podcast
A question in plain English gets an answer stitched together from what teams actually said.
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Show notes
A summary, chapter markers, and pull quotes for each episode.
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Clip finder
The most shareable moments, picked and captioned for Reels and Shorts.
How we keep it honest
The search uses AI, so we built guardrails into every step to keep it accurate and checkable.
- Answers come only from the transcripts. If the archive doesn’t cover your question, the site says so plainly instead of guessing.
- Every answer shows its sources, with the episode name and a timestamp link, so you can watch it yourself.
- We quote or clearly paraphrase. Quotes are checked word for word against the transcript.
- It’s written for students. The whole archive is kept appropriate for a school audience.
How it’s built
All the heavy lifting (transcription, summaries, chapter markers, clip picks, and the search index) happens ahead of time in an offline script and is saved as plain files. That keeps the live site fast and nearly free to run.
The only live step is answering your question, and that goes through a small secure
service so our API key is never exposed. The whole pipeline is documented in
ARCHITECTURE.md.
Watch the full episodes
Everything on this site links back to the original videos.