Three Methods for Transcribing Podcasts

For more than twenty years, the American research company Edison research has analyzed digital media consumption every year. In 2006, according to their data, 22% of Americans knew about podcasts. In 2021, more than half of Americans listened to a podcast at least once in their lives.

Podcasts have become an excellent opportunity for brands to speak directly with audiences and build trust through the brand’s media face. Podcasts seem to be created to immerse the listener in the tube atmosphere of cozy gatherings in the kitchen with friends. Therefore, the main thing for which the business fell in love with podcasts is close contact with the audience.

No matter how successful and prosperous your podcast is, most of the target audience will not be able to hear it. In this case, you should transcribe audio to text. Transcription is the transformation of your audio file into a text document. Yes, you won’t be able to post texts on popular podcast platforms like Google Play, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. However, many websites will happily publish your text, or you can create your blog.

4 Reasons Why You Should Transcribe Podcasts

We have identified four reasons that show the benefits of audio to text transcription:

• Audio transcription will make the post available to target audiences who, for some reason, do not have the opportunity to listen to the recording.
• You are improving SEO. With transcription, you can improve your SEO performance. Your traffic will grow several times. If your podcast contains keywords that search engines love, then you can gain leadership positions. Provided you get your readers interested in podcasts, and you can increase your subscriber base.
• Publications in social networks. It is not required to publish text podcasts on websites: you can use your own Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter pages. Thanks to this approach, even more readers will learn about you. Moreover, if you have an active audience email, you can send them text formats.
• Backlink capabilities. If your text podcasts are informative and highly engaging, people share them. This way, you can get backlinks and attract more audiences without any investment.

Most Affordable Ways to Transcribe Podcasts

Now that you are familiar with the benefits of podcast transcription, you can familiarize yourself with the most affordable transcription methods. We offer both free and paid options.

Method 1 – Self Transcription Podcasts

Self-transcribing podcasts are one of the freeways. You need a text editor and an audio player to transcribe podcasts on your own. As a text editor, you can use Google Docs or Word. We also want to give you some tips for self-transcribing podcasts:

• Place punctuation marks correctly, and do not forget to check the text for missing punctuation marks. Many text editors do not announce that you have made punctuation errors. However, you can use punctuation checkers if you don’t know much about it.
• Break your text into logical paragraphs. Well-structured paragraphs will make your text more readable and easier to understand.
• Don’t use words like “umm,” “oh,” “hmm.” These sounds have no meaning.
• Remove duplicate data from your text. In a podcast, you can talk about the same thing for a long time. However, readers do not like long texts. Therefore, write clearly and to the point.
• You can use timestamps if you want to show at what minute you talked about this information.
• Format your text in a single style that matches your blog’s theme.
• Check if there are any speech, semantic errors in the text.
• If you are publishing a podcast to YouTube, use subtitles. You can also use this tool to decode the sound – this will save you time.
• Compare the text with the original podcast and check if the data there matches.

If you want to transcribe podcasts yourself, keep in mind that this can be time-consuming. Therefore, if you have a reasonable budget, we recommend using paid transcription methods: human and automatic.

Method 2 – Automatic Transcription

You can use special programs for automatic transcription. There are free apps, but they do not guarantee the accuracy of the transcription. Therefore, pay attention to the following programs:

• Express Scribe is a professional audio player built to help you transcribe. Convenient control of the audio stream is provided by hotkeys or by connecting a footswitch. You can control the speed, and there is support for multiple channels, video player, file manager, and much more. The free version supports popular audio formats, including WAV, mp3, WMA, and DCT. The paid version supports proprietary formats and starts at $ 30. You can work with text in almost any popular text editor—for example, Microsoft Word, Corel Wordperfect, Lotus Wordpro.
• LossPlay is an audio transcription program. Hotkeys also control the audio stream without switching between windows. You can work in your favorite text editor and still control playback – LossPlay is primarily configured to work with Microsoft Word. LossPlay supports the insertion of phrases by hotkeys with customization of the text. You can set the timecode in the format you need.
• Transcriber-pro, like its analogs, offers to control audio using hotkeys and a set of prepared phrases. In addition, here, you can put down time stamps and indicate the interlocutors. You can work as a team on one record. You can quickly turn the audio itself into a transcript.

Method 3 – Human Transcription

If you need the most accurate and reliable transcription – hire a transcriber. The experts providing transcription services are much better at rules and techniques than any artificial intelligence. People-transcriptionists perfectly understand various dialects, voices, and accents. Moreover, their experience allows you to transcribe podcasts in the shortest possible time.

Most often, a transcription company is assembled into a team of experts from different countries so that each of you can turn to them for help. Experts can distinguish between similar sounding words with different meanings, which is not feasible for software. The professional human transcribers know how to get rid of jargon and fill the paper with relevant information.

Before sending the text file, they carefully check the document for authenticity to the source. The team of editors proofreads the text to save it from grammatical, punctuation, stylistic, and lexical errors. Thus, you will save money because you do not need to buy the program and seek advice from professional editors – audio transcription services already include all this.

Conclusion

Transcribing podcasts is the most effective method to reach more audiences. Today, you need to take care of people with disabilities – when you give them a post to read, they will feel more confident and aware of current events. Transcription adds value to your podcasts, makes them more accessible, and attracts backlinks. If you have a limited budget – create the text yourself. However, if your budget allows you to turn to experts – get help! This will give you extra time to create new podcasts and save you from blunders.