Running a podcast can be a satisfying hobby or a productive part of your business. It’s a great way to discuss the things that interest you and to give people more information about the things that you are involved in. If you want your podcast to accumulate an engaged audience who tune in regularly though, then you need to give it every opportunity to succeed.
One thing you can do to improve the quality and success of your podcast is to create text transcriptions for the conversations in the podcast. There are a variety of reasons why you would want to do this. It makes your podcast accessible for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. It makes it available for people who don’t understand your spoken language but may understand the written version. It provides an option for people who may not want to listen to an audio podcast but might be interesting in reading the transcript of it.
In addition to all those reasons, having a text version of your podcast available allows search engine bots to parse the text and list the page it is on in their search results. This means that anyone searching for terms that come up in your transcribed text will have a chance of being sent to your podcast’s transcript page and may become a new member of your audience if they like what they find.
Transcribing audio to text manually is a time-consuming process though. Here are a few speech-to-text options that should let you speed up the process considerably.
Google Voice Typing
Google Voice Typing is a free audio to text feature that is available for Google Docs and Google Slides. To use it you will need to access those services via the Google Chrome web browser.
To begin using it to transcribe your podcast you’ll need to create a document at Google Docs while using the Chrome browser. You should have a microphone set up and connected to your computer. Test that the microphone is working correctly and check the audio levels for it before you start.
Navigate to ‘Tools’ on the Google Docs document page and then click the ‘Voice Typing’ option on that page. Then start listening to the audio from your podcast episode and say the words you are hearing clearly into the microphone. This will give you a better transcription result than running the audio through Google Voice Typing directly. If you check the documentation for Google Voice Typing you can also find commands that allow you to manually add punctuation and other things to the transcript.
Once you are done with that you will probably need to go through the transcribed text and clean it up a bit. You can also add the names of the speakers in the podcast discussions to make it easier for the reader to keep track of who is speaking.
Read – 10 Best Audio Editing Softwares (Windows & MAC)
Audext Automatic Transcription Software
If that sounds like a bit too much work then Audext may be a better option for you. Audio to text converter online Audext is a cloud-based software service that uses artificial intelligence to parse speech from podcast audio and similar sources and turn it into legible text. It’s also great for transcribing voice recordings made by reporters, medical and science professionals, lecturers, etc.
To use Audext you’ll need an account with the service. Once you have that account you can go to your Audext dashboard and use the option there to upload your podcast audio and send it to the Audext cloud-hosted editor. You should see the transcribed text begins to appear immediately in your transcription project. You can then edit the transcript and add speaker tags and other info to it. Once you are done the transcript can be downloaded as a TXT or DOC file. This is all pretty simple relative to other transcription methods.
Audext isn’t free but once you factor in the time savings compared to other speech-to-text options it is probably a better option. If your time is valuable to you then you don’t need to save yourself much of that time by using Audext before the service pays for itself.
Adding a transcription for your podcast can open up a lot of options to help you to promote it. You can post excerpts of the transcription up onto social media sites to tease people towards listening to your podcast, and also use it for a variety of other promotional purposes. So explore your transcription options and see which one gives you the best results for the least amount of your time.
