Transcripts are a vital part of your podcast and make it easy for the search engine to crawl your page for information, which may affect your ranking and visibility. You can also use excerpts from your podcast transcript as marketing tools in your social media posts, email newsletters, and other platforms. In this article, I’ll share the top podcast transcription service options in the market.
People with Auditory Processing Disorder face trouble discerning sounds and find it difficult to block out background noises. Such people fairly appreciate a clear transcript of your podcast and enjoy the information at their own pace.
For ELLs, learning through podcasts is one way to build on their knowledge. They find it easy to follow your podcast with a written script so that they do not miss out on any vital information.
Many podcast hosting platforms or podcast software already have a transcription tool integrated within their system. You can either use that or follow the various methods I’ve listed in this article. Before that, let’s dig in more about podcast transcription services.
Frequently Asked Questions About Podcast Transcription Services
If you are a first-time podcast producer or finding it difficult to gain visibility, you might find your answers here.
How do I get my podcast transcribed?
You can either use human-based services like Scribe, Rev or automated transcription editors like Sonix and Otter to generate automated transcriptions that you can edit later. Many podcast hosting software also provides free transcriptions while using their site.
How can I make the process of transcribing podcasts faster for free?
Podcasting software like Descript, Trint, Otter have free trials and free plans that you can use to auto-generate podcast transcriptse3.
What is the best podcasting audio to text transcription software?
Sonix and Otter are by far the most accurate and reliable software to generate transcriptions if your audio is clear of background noise.
Are automatic podcast transcription tools any good?
Yes, Descript, Sonix, and Otter are examples of some of the most accurate, easy-to-use, and reliable automatic podcast transcription tools.
The Best Transcription Tools For Podcasters 2021
Let’s first look at some DIY hacks that you can use instead of using automated software or professional transcription services.
Google Voice Typing
Using Google’s voice typing feature, you can turn the speech into text. It is the most inexpensive method to generate transcription, but you’ll have to invest your time in this.
You’ll have to run your podcast audio on your phone and let the voice typing transcribe it on (pre-enabled voice-typing) Google docs. You can also give voice commands to edit the document or do it manually.
Request volunteers or strike business partnerships
Another way to get transcriptions of your podcast is by requesting volunteers to help you in exchange for something of value to them. Perhaps you can offer transcription services in exchange for business partnerships, such as optimizing their content for SEO or reconstructing their car, filing their invoices, etc.
However, this barter system may backfire if the other person isn’t skilled with transcriptions, messes up the script’s format, or even call in a favor at an odd time. You need to weigh your options and see which of these work the best for you.
Video Captions
This is another DIY method where you can use YouTube to get transcriptions. You can upload your audio as a video on YouTube and use its closed captions to generate a transcript. However, it won’t be 100% accurate if you have an accent or the audio is unclear. For SEO reasons, you cannot solely rely on YouTube, and you must have another form of your transcript ready for display.
Human Intelligence Based Transcription Podcast Transcription Service
Manual transcription is much more accurate than artificial intelligence (AI) powered transcription software and can even draw out scripts from unclear audio.
Hire Transcription Professionals From Rev
Rev offers affordable, premium on-demand transcription, translation, and video caption services. They have a turnaround time of 24 hours with accurate and error-free transcriptions. They provide transparent pricing and also re-evaluate the transcripts if you aren’t satisfied with them.
All the transcripts are editable to add tags, highlight words, add comments and make notes.
Price: $1.25 per audio minute.
Scribie Service
Scribie is a transcription service company that produces both manual and automated high-quality transcripts for a reasonable price. They perform a 4-step transcription process to provide maximum accuracy. The manual transcripts are naturally more accurate than AI-powered scripts, and if you aren’t satisfied with their service, they offer a free review for the same.
You just have to upload your file, make payment, and you’ll get your file in 36 hours. There’s an online integrated editor that you can use to check your transcript against the audio file. It’s possible to review and edit any inaudible sounds that are time-stamped and marked with a blank.
Price: It costs $0.10/ minute for automated transcriptions and $0.80/ minute for manual transcription.
Takenote.co: Professional Minute & Note-taking
It’s a UK-based transcription, captions, live-minute, and note-taking service that provides a quality output at competitive prices. Their transcription team ensures 99% accuracy and a turnaround time of 24 hours, even for a large file. TakeNote also keeps your data safe by following ISO and GDPR compliance.
They provide verbatim transcription, which means you get the complete transcription of your podcast in its entirety, except the filter words. Here’s how the process takes place:
- You have to upload your podcast via their website or API
- Choose the turnaround time according to the transcription service.
- You have the option to pay as you go or fill their account form to place your order.
Post this, you’ll receive a secure link to download your requested transcription script.
Price: The transcription service starts at £0.99 per minute.
Podcast Transcription Via Artificial Intelligence-Based Software
Manual transcription can get tedious, but artificial intelligence (AI) powered transcription software can take work off your plate. They can produce up to 90% accurate copies of your media files and do it in a flash!
Sonix
Sonix’s interface is slightly clunky and outdated, but you can drag and drop your files or upload them from Zoom, Youtube, Dropbox, and Drive.
It gives you a brief report about the quality of the transcript and shows if the draft needs heavy or light editing and the percentage of very confident, fairly confident, slightly confident words with tips to improve the recordings.
You can add timecodes, rewind and forward, change playback speed, add subtitles, see the number of words each speaker says, add words to the Sonix dictionary, use the find and replace feature, add notes, and customize the editor’s interface. However, Sonix needs to improve its accuracy for low-quality audio transcripts.
Pros:
- It has a robust editor.
- You can directly integrate with Zoom and Zapier.
- It gives you a report on the quality of the transcripted draft and a rough idea of the amount of editing it would need to be perfect.
- Sonix allows you to directly upload your files from Zoom, Youtube, Dropbox, and Drive.
Cons:
- It cannot transcribe low-quality audio with even a minimum percentage of accuracy.
- You may experience delays in exporting your transcripts.
- It can take time to understand editing features.
Otter
Otter works best for in-house communication between the team with the live notes feature, an add-on for Zoom meeting hosts to enable live transcriptions and note-taking.
Otter’s interface is attractive and sleek. It also gives you a video tour of all its features to help you understand how to utilize them and lets you set daily agenda, schedule meetings, create a group, share files and folders, etc.
This speech-to-text transcription software has a web interface, desktop app, and mobile applications available on iOS and Android.
Editing the transcript is a smooth process. You can highlight, copy, add a picture and photo to a specific word and export the file as TXT, DOCS, PDF, SRT file, OR share the URL link to people in your Otter group.
Price: There’s a basic plan which is free to use with 600 minutes of transcription and three import files, and there are three pricing plans as follows:
- Pro: $8.33/month, billed annually with custom vocabulary and advanced exports.
- Business: $20/month, billed annually with Zoom live notes & captions.
Pros
- You can record audio right from the dashboard.
- It lets you add pictures to specific words.
- You can see all the keywords of the transcript at the top of the dashboard.
- Otter lets you auto-tag and rematch speakers.
- It has an accuracy of 85% with less or no background noise.
- You can directly integrate with Zoom.
Cons
- The grammar can be wrong with missing words and incorrect punctuations.
- Otter poorly transcribes unfiltered audios.
- There is no option to export in VTT format.
Final Thoughts
Between creating your podcast and marketing it, you may not have enough time at your hands to worry about perfecting the transcriptions. You can either use a paid transcription service or automated podcast transcription software like Sonix and Otter to reduce your workload.
Fortunately, if you are just starting out with plenty of time at hand, some of the DIY methods listed above can also help you generate transcriptions for your podcasts.