How to build a transcript

What does my podcast need to be accessible?

A transcript! It is required that all podcasts must have an accompanying transcript that accurately reflects the audio content of the podcast.

This means that all transcripts must be accurate, correctly identify all of the speakers, describe important background sounds, and be grammatically correct.

You want your transcript to be easily understood without any additional audio information.

What tools can I use to build a transcript?

Do - it - yourself transcription

  • YouTube: If you’re able to convert your audio file to a video file:
    1. Upload your video file to YouTube.
    2. Allow YouTube time to auto-generate captions for your video. This may take up to 24 hours.
    3. Edit your auto-generated captions. You will need to ensure that your captions are accurate and grammatically correct. Be sure to add speaker identification.
    4. Download your captions to convert into a transcript. You will need to remove timestamps and do a bit of clean-up.
    5. Learn more about How to Edit Auto Captions in YouTube. NOTE: You can set your YouTube video to ‘Private’ if you do not want it to be publicly viewable.
  • Coming soon: Whisper AI
  • Audioship: If you don’t have a way to convert your audio to video, Audioship will convert your file and place it on your YouTube channel for you.
    1. You’ll add an image to use as a placeholder for the video content.
    2. Once in YouTube, your audio will get captioned automatically.
    3. Use YouTube’s caption editing tool to fix the captions, and download the caption file and/or the transcript.
    4. Next, you’ll have two options:
      • Delete the video and just use the downloaded transcript file. (Or set the video to private and save it, just in case.)
      • Share the podcast as a video with closed captions as well as a transcript.
  • Google Docs Tool: Voice Typing: If you have clear, high quality audio, it is possible to use this tool to transcribe the audio into text in a Google Document. It will require clean up, but may save you time typing.

Professional transcription services

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