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Welcome to Podcast Answers, the show where I help you start and grow your
podcast of answering any podcasting questions along the way. That's right.
I am here to help you answer your questions and that's what this episode is about.
So it's been a little while. I've had to take a week off here just
due to life and things like that, but I wanted to get back with you today and
talk a little bit about podcasts and transcripts because
Apple podcasts, believe it or not, just came out and said, hey,
on an upcoming iOS, so 17.4, we are going to support
the use of transcripts. And so today I'm going to talk a little bit about
transcripts, why they're useful for you, and what you need to know about
them when it comes to Apple podcasts. So what are transcripts? So transcripts are
just like they sound. They are a word for word,
time-stamped, a dialogue of your show. So if you're looking in a
podcast app right now that supports transcripts and the one that I use as
a cast-a-matic, you will see the words that I'm saying written out for you on
screen. So why is this important? Not only does it help, because you may not
always understand what I'm saying, but if you are hard of hearing
or you are learning English, this is a great way that you can
read and see exactly what I'm saying. So you get a chance to
experience the podcast the same way that others do. If you can't hear very well
or again, or if you're learning English and you don't know English, you can
use the podcast, you can experience the podcast just like
you would if you could hear well. So one of the great things, and not
only to mention that, but some companies have actually been sued
for not having transcripts in their shows, not making them accessible. And so
why not? It doesn't take very long to do so, and now especially with Apple
podcasts, creating them for you, it's a great thing. So the
transcript tag has actually been around for a little while.
Podcasting 2.0 came up with the transcript tag,
and which allows you to basically say, for this episode,
here's a transcript file that will allow you to
to show your transcript anywhere that shows transcripts.
So what you can do is you provide your own transcript.
You can use something like Mac Whisper or
Whisper or any other program, Descript. There's lots of Otter AI. There's lots
of places that you can go online to get a transcript of your episode.
And some are going to do better than others. Some are going to be
just kind of not great at all. I know a lot of times it messes up my last name,
Lehmann, when it tries to create something. So I usually go through and
edit my podcasts so that that way my transcript is actually going to be
correct for it. So that's what I do when it comes to
transcripts. I take my show and run it through a program called Mac Whisper,
and Mac Whisper takes it and transcribes it for me. I get a file.
And then my podcast host actually allows me to upload that
to them. So I'm using Captivate. Again, if you want to try Captivate out, it's a
great podcast host. You can find that at podcastanswers.com/captivate,
and you will get, you go ahead and demo that out.
But it allows me to take that episode, that transcript of my episode, and
upload it to their host, to their file. And then, because it's linked in my RSS,
any apps that use the transcript tag will show it.
So what Apple Podcasts did is they came out and said,
"Not only are we going to support the podcasting 2.0 transcript tag," which is
great because everyone says podcasting 2.0 is not being supported by
the big players like Apple and Spotify. Now it is. It's being supported by
Apple. And so what Apple did is not only say you can
put a podcast episode transcript in your feed and we will show it to
people in an upcoming release of iOS on the Apple
Podcast app. But if you don't provide that, we will
actually generate one for you. And so this is really cool because now
everyone is going to be able to have their own transcript. Now,
yes, you can let Apple Podcasts create your transcript, but I would recommend
doing it on your own. And here's the reason why. Because
you don't have a chance to actually look and edit the words
on Apple Podcast transcript. Now, I think that they're going to do a very good
job at the transcript. But things like my name, I wouldn't
be able to correct that because it's already up there.
So what I do is I provide my own. So that's why I still would provide
my own. But it's great because if you don't want to do that, you don't want to
spend the money, you don't want to find an app that allows you to do transcripts,
you can just allow Apple Podcasts to do that. Now, there are some settings that
you need to know if you're going to provide your own
episode, your own thing, your own transcript.
And here is what it is. So in Apple Podcasts Connect, so
podcastsconnect.apple.com, you go into your show. And if
you're watching the video right now, you're seeing this on my screen, but you
go into your show and you click the availability tab.
And when you do that at the very bottom, it says transcripts. It says,
"Apple will automatically generate episode transcripts for your show."
You can also provide your own transcripts through RSS or
upload depending on transcripts. You know,
displaying these transcripts will help make your podcast more accessible.
And then there's a radio button there that says,
"Only display auto-generated transcripts by Apple." And that's on by default
or display transcripts provided or generated transcripts by Apple if
there isn't one provided. So I would suggest that you go in right now.
Even if you're not planning on doing transcripts
at all, providing your own transcripts, go into Apple Podcasts Connect
and select where it says, "Display transcripts that I provide"
or "Auto-generated transcripts by Apple Podcasts" if one isn't
provided. And so what's really kind of cool about this
is, again, you can provide your own
show or your own podcast transcript. And
Apple Podcasts supports two different formats. The VTT format or
SRT format, they say that they prefer a VTT format and that's a
little bit better of a format of transcript. So what they're going to do
is they're going to generate the VTT one, but you can do an SRT.
So the cool thing though is you can go into
an episode that it already has generated
feed transcript for. So this is what I'm showing on screen right now is
an episode of my other podcast that it has generated a transcript for. And you
can see that if I'm looking at the episode and I scroll down to the bottom
it says, "Audio and transcripts" and then this is a subscriber only episode. So it's
under the subscriber episode areas. But then it says, "Transcripts
Auto-generated." And if you click on that, what it does is it allows you
to download the VTT. So you can actually download it and edit it
if you want. So I did say that Apple Podcasts, you can't necessarily
go ahead and edit your show. You're
thinking, "You can. If you download it here you can
then provide it back to them, a corrected version."
But again, you have to wait for them to generate the
transcript and it can take a little while to happen.
It doesn't happen immediately with Apple Podcasts.
It does take a little while for them. It could take up to a day to generate
the transcript. But you know what? I'm looking through this transcript right
now and the one that it provided is actually
generated is pretty good. And so the other thing you can do is
then select that you don't want to use the auto-generated one and one
that's provided. Now in this case I didn't supply one
for this. So it just actually auto-generated one for me
and that is really cool because you can
you can just have it generate all of the transcripts for you.
So that's the basics when it comes to
when it comes to transcripts. Again, why would you want a transcript?
You would want one because it's allowing you to
provide better functionality for people who may be hard of hearing or
in some cases want to see part of your episode but want to read it.
So it is time-synced and what's cool with Apple's is it is like a word-by-word
display. So as you're talking it does a word-by-word
display of the words that you're saying. So it's kind of like what you're
seeing in Instagram Reels lately where it has
word-for-word transcripts where it's highlighting things word-for-word.
And with the VTT it can also show speaker names which is really cool because if
you provide speaker names so if I had me and a co-host or a guest
I could let you know the blocks that I'm speaking
versus the blocks that my co-host or guest are speaking
and that would show up differently in the app. So that's definitely
really cool. Again, this is not coming this is not out yet with Apple Podcasts
but I would go into your Apple Podcasts Connect
right now and make that switch under the show setting
to allow them to show transcripts that you provide. Again, even if you're not
planning on giving transcripts to you know providing them through
your RSS feed I would go switch that on right now because
one of the things is if you do decide to do that later
you'll have it or if you do generate it for one specific episode
then you're going to have that in your podcast
in your RSS feed. So you can start doing that now.
A lot of podcast hosts are supporting podcast transcripts again like what I said
Captivate is one of them. Captivate for me is one of the best podcast hosts.
Blueberry is another one that supports it and they're a good podcast host also.
And so you can generate your own transcripts right now
and upload them to your podcast host to through some podcast hosts
which allow you to do that. And what's really cool about that is
just again it allows you to be more accessible
and more available for your listeners. And it just doesn't
it's not going to cost you a whole lot if anything. So for me I have MacWhisperer
does a pretty decent job. That's just a free download for me.
I could go ahead and pay for it and get a better model
and I wouldn't have to correct quite as often. But the great things are if you
supply your own transcripts then you get to control what it says. You control
if the words are right in the transcript or not.
Have you started your podcast journey? If not and you want to have help starting
your podcast journey. If this transcript thing sounds too
too involved for you I would love to help you
start and grow your show. I'm also available for
doing podcast editing and producing and posting. And you can find all of that
information by contacting me at podcastanswers.com/contact.
And I would love to help you out doing
your show, producing your show. Guys thank you so much for hanging out with
me today. I will actually be out of town this
next week so I will not be doing a show this next
Thursday but you can look for a show on the following Thursday.
Thanks guys have a great week!
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