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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! [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]