Podcast transcripts

TidBITS Talk
1

I listen to podcasts pretty regularly. Most of them don’t have transcripts. I wanted to ask you if you know of any service that will be able to give me the transcription of a podcast episode. I found that rev.com, but it is very expensive. Are there any cheaper options that you’re aware of?

2

This could be what you need.

https://app.trint.com/plans

3

I think you get me wrong. I am listener of podcasts. I don’t publish or produce podcasts. As a listener, there has to be a cheaper option.

4

You could try Otter. https://otter.ai/

The free account has a limited number of imports / minutes but I think its about 100 a year for more than that.

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5

Thanks, that was helpful. They allow only the first 40 minutes as free with an overall limit of 660 minutes as free. But, in those 660 minutes, the restriction is 40 minutes per episode. So, and they don’t bill monthly. Annual billing $10, still caper than rev.com. I’ll check it out and thanks once again.

6

Sorry, they do have a monthly plan as well and it costs $13 for one month as against $100 annually. So, one can kind of spend $13 and give it a spin.

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7

Rev is one of the cheapest options for human-edited transcripts and captioning. It is more expensive than text generated by software alone.

Otter.ai is a good software-only product. Their software is also what generates the transcripts and live captions built into Zoom.

If you’re interested in having text accompany the audio (vs. having a transcript to read instead of listing), can you play the podcasts in a browser? Google Chrome can live caption any audio or video played in the browser, it even works offline. It’s similar to the Live Transcribe feature available on many Android phones. There might be other creative ideas for using free live captioning features; I think both Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint (with 365 subscription) can show live captions of speech your microphone picks up while giving a presentation.

There’s the macOS dictation feature but I don’t know if it could keep going, non-stop, for the length of a typical podcast. The Google Docs Voice Typing feature has the same potential. The advantage of these is unlike live captioning features, at the end you still have a copy of all the text.

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8

Thanks for the detailed reply. I need transcripts because they are after to read, highlight and take notes. I also gathered that rev.com is powered by humans, so that means it isn’t as expensive as appears.