As a podcaster, you know that producing a high-quality show is important. But you may not realize that transcribing your podcast can be just as valuable. There are several reasons why transcribing your podcast is a good idea, and there are a number of transcription tools you can use. That is what Cody Hanify, Podcast Strategy Booking & Social Promotions Manager at Podetize, talks about in this episode. Cody takes over the mic on behalf of Tracy Hazzard and Tom Hazzard to walk you through why transcribing your podcast is important. He will also share the latest transcription tools you can use to convert your podcasts to engaging blogs.

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Convert Your Audio Easily With The Best Do-It-Yourself Transcription Tools

Why Transcribe Your Podcast

On behalf of Tom and Tracy, I will be taking over this subject. What I’ll be talking about is transcribing your podcast. Transcribing your podcast generates a text file that is shareable and searchable. Transcription is one of the best ways to improve your podcast and your podcast’s SEO opportunity. SEO is your Search Engine Optimization. In simple terms, all that means is the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business. In your case, podcasts, such as Google and all the search engines. The better visibility that your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention, attract prospective, and existing customers to your podcasts.

Why is SEO important to try to take care of something? Podetize clients understand this. We provide this as a service. We create what we call verbal SEO blog posts. What those do is it’s a transcription of your podcast. We take that and throw it into an embedded blog post along with Google images and other different quotes that we’ll put in. We’ll also embed the MP3 file from your show into the blog post. The reason why we created it as a blog post is because this is going to make sure that your SEO is set up for success and for the most optimization you can with keyword searches. We are making sure that people who don’t know your podcast can already find you.

Every day, people are searching for terms. You might be talking about those, and you want to make sure that you are found by those specific people. That’s why transcribing and turning these into blog posts are very important for your searchability and overall engagement with people that don’t already know your show or content. You’re talking about things that possibly people would love to know about. We want to expand your reach to the unlimited amount of people out there searching on topics every single day.

 

Providing Accessibility For The Deaf

Transcription also makes your content widely accessible. What’s important is that it makes your show accessible to those who are deaf, have hearing impairments, or speak another language. I found an article and I thought this would be very important to share. It’s with the Disability Rights Advocates or the DRA and the National Association of the Deaf or the NAD. I found this on DRALegal.org. In December 14th, 2021 in New York, the National Association of the Deaf, NAD, and Disability Rights Advocates, DRA, filed a lawsuit against three major providers of podcasts. Those were SiriusXM, Stitcher, and Pandora, to end their exclusion of deaf and hard-hearing Americans from each company’s extensive podcast streaming service.

The article goes and says, “Because defendants do not make transcripts or captions available for any of the podcasts offered on their platforms, more than 48 million deaf and hard-hearing Americans are denied full and equal enjoyment of the content that they offer hearing users. These failures to provide equal access violate the Americans With Disabilities Act as well as state and local New York law.” I highly recommend you check that out to understand there are many communities out there that utilize transcripts because they want to be involved with the podcasting world. Transcripts make that available for these different communities, which is very nice. Lawsuit Challenges Inaccessibility of Major Podcast Platforms is the title of the article.

Transcription Tools

Not only is it important for the different types of communities to provide a transcript so they can read, but it’s important for your searchability options within the Google search engine and all the different search engines. We want to optimize SEO as much as we possibly can. The best way we can do that is through transcriptions. For the done-for-you clients with Podetize, these are services that we already apply to you. What I’m coming on to talk about for DIY customers. Those are the people that like to edit and transcribe all of their own podcast episodes, and we upload the podcast episodes for them and get them syndicated.

 

I have a couple of tools for you to take a look at. You might be thinking, “What tools should I use?” There are many tools available. I want to start with a unique tool that we found. Whitney Lauritsen showed the team this, and it’s pretty unique. All you have to do is take the audio, drag it into the software interface, and give it time to upload. It takes a few minutes, and your transcription is ready to go. This tool is called EditEddy. You can find it at EditEddy.com. It’s a free thing. You just enter in all of your signup information. It’s a new tool from Headliner, so I recommend checking that out.

There are a couple of things with the interface. It’s a little bit hard to edit everything with ease. It takes a minute for you to get involved with the audio editing process. There’s a little video that plays while your audio is uploading to the interface. It shows you how to navigate through it. You can edit and take everything out. It’s pretty seamless.

Another type of software that’s out there is called Descript. Descript is time-saving software with drag-and-drop features. It’s a tool that you can use to record and edit your entire podcast by yourself. Descript is an audio and video editing platform. It’s not only something that takes already-made audio and transcribes it, but it’s an actual interface you can use to record your podcast episode. Descript offers a Mac app as well as human-powered transcription services, which costs a little bit more, but we’ll get into that.

 

What’s cool about Descript is you can take a multi-track and put it into one transcription. It creates a multi-track voice transcription. What that means is if you have more than one speaker, you can upload the separate voice transcriptions and it will put it into one document altogether. It’s awesome. You can record your podcast directly on the platform. That makes it easier for people that don’t have that platform, the recording tools, or the means to get your podcasts out there. I would highly recommend checking out Descript if you want that one platform that does it all.

What’s cool about Descript is you can multitask while you edit. It has this great feature. When you delete a text, it deletes that whole actual section of audio from the audio file that you uploaded. It makes it easy for you to edit your audio and transcription. Make sure that your show sounds and looks as seamless as you possibly can all from one interface. You can also add music to your audio with all the different multi-track functions. You’ll see it in the interface when you go look at Descript. You’ll be able to edit it and put it in the timeline. It puts different things over what I’ve already said, all in the same interface.

While I was diving into Descript, I found out that there was this neat tool to utilize. It’s not necessarily for everyone, but I thought it would be cool to touch on it a little bit. It’s called Overdub. Overdub is a deepfake AI technology that takes your voice. Anytime you type text to it, it makes it sound like you’re saying that.

Turning podcasts into blog posts is very important for your searchability and overall engagement with people who don't know your show or content. Click To Tweet

All you have to do is to type and throw it into Overdub. What it’ll do is it’ll take that text and make it an audio version of that text that sounds like you. All you have to do is go through this process to where you read a script that they provide. It takes about 30 minutes for you to read this random script that Descript has provided for you. In that way, it gets to know your voice, all the ums, uhs, and everything that you do with your voice. It will take that and make any texts you type sound close to yourself. It’s not seamless or professional-sounding audio. It does sound like voice-to-text sometimes. It’s something that I don’t recommend you use for the entirety of a podcast, typing it out and then making it accessible for people to listen to.

It’s cool because it generates audio of your own voice without even recording. Why that is important is if you forgot to say something or you wanted to touch on something a little bit more and you weren’t able to talk about that, it makes it super easy for you to go in, type something out, and add something that you wanted to patch up stuff that you wanted to say earlier. Instead of plugging in all of your equipment, taking it out, and then recording a whole new episode, this can be something you use to easily add what you wanted to add instead of going around and ensuring that you have the correct audio recording by starting all over. We would hate that, so this is a neat tool. It’s called Overdub. You should check that out.

With Descript, you can also create audiograms uploaded to social media. It will take a section or whatever sections you would like. It would take that piece of audio and put a whole background image to it with little waveforms, and then you’ll be able to upload it to all the different types of social media. You can upload it to YouTube, Instagram, or anywhere that you want to upload it.

 

It comes down to the pricing of Descript. EditEddy is a completely free interface that you can use. It has its complications with editing. With Descript, I talked about a lot of cool game-changing things here. There are a couple of different tiers of pricing. There is a free tier of pricing, which comes with three hours of transcription, and it has access to full video and audio editing. Note that if you’re going to use the video editing tool here for the free version, it displays a watermark over it. You’ll have to get a higher-paying subscription package to get that watermark taken off. It comes with that free trial of Overdub’s deepfake technology that I was talking about. It’s super neat.

The next tier of pricing is called Creator, and that comes with ten hours a month of transcription audio capability. You get ten hours a month. It takes that watermark off the video. That’s going to be $12 a month. They then have their Pro to your pricing, which is 30 hours of transcription. It gets those audiograms and unlimited access to that Overdub deepfake AI technology that I was also talking about. It gives custom drive and page branding to your brand. Everything is super seamless. That’s only going to be $24 a month. That’s Descript. If you’re looking for something that’s an all-in-all tool to help you edit, record, and upload all at the same time, this is a cool, easy-to-use, and time-saving game-changer.

If you’re not used to all these other different interfaces, Zoom has uploaded its own version of a transcript. It’s available for only the Business, Education, and Enterprise plan. If you have a standard free version or the pro version, you’ll have to spend a little bit more money a month to get access to this Zoom feature. It’s pretty easy to use and seamless. Once you’re inside your actual interface, go to your settings and click Recording. When you get here to the Advanced Cloud Recording settings, there is a check box that you’re able to check off and it creates an audio transcript of the show.

Many communities utilize transcripts because they want to be involved with the podcasting world. Click To Tweet

It’s not the most legible transcript that you want to be utilizing on a blog-style post for your SEO opportunities. It’s mainly for understanding what the audio transcript does. There are time marks for everything and who was speaking. It breaks it up pretty unnaturally for someone to read through a little bit. It’s not my number one suggestion to use for transcription technology, but it’s available out there for you.

Another one that’s easy for you to use that a lot of people use is Otter.ai. It transcribes texts and highlights a summary. It creates automated meeting notes with AI. The cool thing about Otter is that they’ll record everything that they have in real-time. The Otter.ai pricing is also a little bit different, but I wanted to go through a couple of those. There’s the Basic plan, which lets you transcribe and record live, search and playback recordings, and highlight and insert comments. It’s got all of those features for you in the Basic package. If you move up to Pro, that’s $8.33 a month. It’s a little under $9 a month and it gives you the Otter Assistant for Zoom. You’ll be able to integrate Otter.ai with your Zoom platform. This is why I was going through and going to touch upon Otter.ai.

There is also the Business one. This is recommended for small teams and organizations that need to share and collaborate. That’s at $20 a month, and it gives you team collaboration features, prioritized support, and an outline summary for their beta program. It integrates the Otter Assistant for Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. That will give you unlimited access. The Pro version gives you a limited trial for that. You’ll need to get the Business if you want to hook up your Otter.ai subscription with your Zoom so you can get transcriptions there with ease.

 

Otter.ai has a phone app. What you could utilize that phone app for is the recording of your transcript in real-time. You can get on your normal setup where you’re recording normally into your microphone or whatever interface you’re utilizing to record the audio and then set up your phone right next to you. You can record your podcast like normal while you have your phone out with the app open to record. In real-time, it will be transcribing your episode or whatever you’re saying with that immediately. That’s a way that you can utilize that as well.

That’s all I had to go over with you. I showcased a couple of different software and technologies that help you use this tool and utilize transcribing for your audio. It will make it easy for you to upload these to different website pages. Also, make sure that you can get a transcribed version of your podcast for everyone to be able to help your searchability and the different communities out there. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this episode. We hope you have a great day.

 

Important Links

• DRALegal.org
• Lawsuit Challenges Inaccessibility of Major Podcast Platforms
• EditEddy.com
• Descript
• Overdub
• Zoom
• Otter.ai

 

About Cody Hanify

Cody Hanify works internally with the sales department for Podetize. He is a podcaster, stage actor, and short film producer based in Orange County, California. You can soon check out his new podcast he’s launching called We Watch It, where he and his co-hosts take their unique perspectives on films, tv, and other content.