Podcast transcription

What is a transcription

A transcription is simply the spoken contents of your podcast, written out as text. It can be done by hand or with the help of a machine, and Castcore lets you do both. On the Solo tier you add your own pre-written transcription to the episode; on Producer, you can have an AI write it for you.

Why is transcription needed?

It isn’t strictly required, but it makes your podcast more accessible — and accessible content is easier for search engines to index, which brings more listeners to your episode. A transcription also lets people search your back catalogue by what you’ve actually said, not just the episode title and description. This works on any platform that has built transcription indexing, such as the Castcore Index.

How does it work?

Go to your episode page and click Transcripts. Depending on your tier, you’ll see up to two boxes. The first is for an AI transcription and is available on the Producer tier. Below it, you can link to a transcription you’ve hosted somewhere else.

AI transcriptions are batched across all Castcore users, and batched transcription is included in your subscription on the Producer tier. Your transcription is generally ready in less than 24 hours, regardless of how long the episode is. However, usually we see transcriptions being done in the first five to fifteen minutes depending on episode length.

Once it’s ready, the transcription is attached to your episode automatically and your feed is regenerated on its own. You only ever click Transcribe once — everything after that is handled for you. We automatically produce two different transcription filetypes to make sure the transcription works on every streaming service.

We’re also planning a prioritized transcription add-on for the Producer tier. It always pushes your job to the front of the queue, across all our Speech-to-Text resources.

What streaming services support podcast transcriptions?

Your transcription rides along in your feed through the standard podcast:transcript tag — part of the Podcasting 2.0 spec. Whether a given app shows it comes down to whether that app bothers to read the tag.

• Apple Podcasts — yes, when you opt in. Apple auto-generates a transcript by default, but you can switch to using your own, and it’ll pull the one straight from your feed and label it “Provided by [your show]”. Castcore delivers the VTT format Apple expects, so there’s nothing extra for you to do.
• The open apps — Pocket Casts, Podverse, Podcast Addict, Fountain and the rest of the Podcasting 2.0 crowd read the tag directly and display your transcription as-is.
• The Castcore Index — uses your transcription to power full-text search across your episodes.
• Spotify and YouTube — don’t read transcriptions from your feed at all. They each generate their own, on their side, for a selection of shows.

So even on the platforms that roll their own, your transcription is the accurate, controlled version everywhere that does read the feed — and it’s what makes your words searchable. Write or generate it once, and it travels with your show wherever your audience listens.