Podcast Transcription

Transcribe a podcast episode

Podcasters producing show notes, publishers building searchable archives, and marketing teams mining episodes for quotes and clips.

MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, OGG, MP4 · up to 20 MB as a guest

Transcribing your audio…

What makes podcast recordings hard

Podcast audio is usually the best-quality material a transcription model ever sees — close microphones, treated rooms, edited takes. The difficulty is not accuracy but volume: a weekly show accumulates hundreds of hours that nobody has time to process.

A workflow that holds up

1

Transcribe the final edited export rather than raw tracks, so the transcript matches what listeners hear.

2

Use the clean transcript for show notes and the timestamped one for chapter markers.

3

Pull quotable lines for social clips straight from the text rather than scrubbing audio.

4

Publish the transcript on the episode page — it makes the episode findable in search.

Things worth knowing first

  • Guest names and company names are the most common errors; fix them once per episode.
  • Publishing transcripts is one of the few reliable ways podcast content becomes searchable at all.
  • Intro music at the start occasionally produces stray text — trim the first few seconds if it bothers you.

What you get back

Every job returns both versions. Take whichever fits the job.

Clean transcript for reading and editing
Thanks everyone for joining. Let's start with last month's numbers. I'll share my screen so you can follow along. The headline is that renewals came in ahead of forecast for the third quarter running.
Timestamped for subtitles and citation
[00:00 → 00:04] Thanks everyone for joining.
[00:04 → 00:09] Let's start with last month's numbers.
[00:09 → 00:14] I'll share my screen so you can follow along.

An illustration of the two output formats. Not the result of any particular recording.

Questions about podcast transcription

Yes, and you should. Search engines cannot index audio, so a transcript is what makes an episode discoverable.
Use the timestamped transcript to find topic changes, then copy those times into your podcast host.
Mostly. Genuine simultaneous speech is where any transcription tool loses words.

Other things people transcribe

Recording in a language other than English? See our language-by-language guides →

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