Podcast Transcription

Have you considered having your podcast episodes transcribed? Make your podcasts searchable and accessible easily with text transcripts.Transcribe your podcasts and help your audiences find and use it.

A podcast most commonly refers to an audio file, but can also be a video or text file, that is subscribed via a web format known as an RSS feed. A podcast is like a radio talk show except people can download a podcast to a portable media player (like an iPod or other mp3 players). Podcasts are normally small audio files posted on a website for business or personal reasons.

Podcasting is popular.  Having a podcast allows you to reach out to site visitors in a way that posting to a blog can’t do.  With a podcast, your listeners can download right to their MP3 player of choice, and listen on the go, when it’s convenient for them.

However, audio files, such as those that make up a podcast, can’t make it easier for potential listeners to find your site.

Providing a transcription of the text as a supplement to your podcast can be helpful to your audiences.

One of the most frustrating things about podcasts, especially the long ones, is that it's hard to capture or cite interesting things that people say. There are some people that like to have text to read so they can follow along as they listen to audio and there are also people out there that would prefer to just read the transcript than listen to the audio.  This is probably the most common reason why people choose to have their podcasts transcribed.

Secondly, having the text of your podcast on your site opens your podcast up to those who are hearing impaired/deaf. With transcript along your podcast, you will be able to share the information, thus expanding your base of visitors.

You can also post the transcript into blog posts, articles etc.  You can get as creative as you want and use the transcript however you see fit.

A podcast is distributed using RSS syndication feeds to notify users about updates. A podcast consists of several audio data (MP3 files) called Episodes and a syndication feed (RSS) that includes metadata information about episodes. The feed provides the list of URLs of audio files by which episodes can be accessed and other information such as the published date, titles, and summaries.

How to transcribe podcasts

A transcriptionist listens to the audio, and types it into a Word or text document.  There are multiple levels of transcription that could be very useful to a podcaster.

• Summary - The main points of the podcast are pulled out, in order, and put into text.
• Strict verbatim - Every sound is typed.  This includes the uhs, ums, ahs, and sentence pauses, stutters, and restarts.
• Cleaned up verbatim - The uhs, ums, ahs, and other such filler sounds are omitted from the transcription, but sentence pauses, stutters, and restarts are included.
• Edited - In this form of transcription, filler sounds are omitted, as are sentence pauses, stutters, and restarts.  This form of transcription is cleaner, and looks better in writing, making it easier for the reader to understand.