How to Transcribe a Podcast to Text (Free Ways First)

The short answer: Check whether the transcript already exists before you make one. Apple Podcasts and Spotify both carry transcripts for a large share of their catalogues, and many shows publish one on their own site. If none exists, play the episode aloud and record it on a second device.

Most advice on this jumps straight to “upload the file to a transcription service”, which skips the part where somebody has usually done the work for you already, for free. Here is the order worth trying.

1. Check Apple Podcasts

Apple generates transcripts automatically for a large part of the Apple Podcasts catalogue. Open the episode, tap the more button, and look for the transcript option. It appears as text that scrolls in time with the audio, and it is searchable — tap a line to jump the audio there.

Coverage is not complete. Older back catalogue, shows in less common languages, and some independent feeds are the usual gaps. But for a mainstream English-language podcast released in the last couple of years, the odds are good.

The catch: the transcript is designed to be read in the app, not exported. Selecting large amounts of text out of it is awkward, which is why people go looking for another method even when the transcript exists.

2. Check Spotify

Spotify carries transcripts for many shows as well, shown in the episode view. The same caveats apply — coverage varies, and it is built for reading rather than exporting.

If you are transcribing an episode to quote from it, either of these is sufficient. If you need the whole thing as a file, keep going.

3. Check the podcast’s own website

This is the step everyone skips and it is frequently the best one. A surprising number of shows — particularly interview shows, news podcasts and anything with a newsletter attached — publish a full transcript with each episode, often as a plain web page you can copy in one go.

Search for the episode title plus the word “transcript”. Two minutes here saves an hour of work often enough to be worth trying every time.

4. Ask the show

If a transcript is not published and you need one for a legitimate reason — accessibility, research, translation — ask. Podcasters frequently have a transcript they simply did not publish, and most will send it. This is faster than any technical route and it sidesteps the copyright question entirely.

5. Transcribe it yourself

If none of the above works, you are producing the transcript. Two routes.

If you have the audio file — a download from the show’s site, or an episode you can export — feed it to a transcription tool. Note that most phone recording apps, ours included, are built around recording rather than importing arbitrary files, so this route usually means a desktop tool or a web service.

If you only have playback — which is the common case, because streaming apps do not hand you the file — play the episode out loud and record it:

1. Play the episode on a speaker, not headphones. A laptop or smart speaker is fine.
2. Record on a second device placed 30–50cm away, on a hard surface, not touching the speaker.
3. Set the playback volume to normal listening level. Loud enough to distort is worse than quiet.
4. Let it run. This takes real time — an hour-long episode takes an hour.

Audio captured this way is lossy but consistent, which is what transcription actually cares about. A podcast recorded from a speaker in a quiet room transcribes better than a live meeting in a noisy office, because the source was already clean and there is no crosstalk.

If the episode is an interview with two or more voices, speaker labels are what make the result readable — a two-person conversation without them is a wall of text where you cannot tell the host from the guest.

What you can do with the transcript

Worth being clear about, because this is where people get into trouble.

Your own use is ordinary. Reading it, searching it, quoting a line in a piece of writing with attribution, keeping it for research — none of this is remarkable.

Publishing it is different. A podcast episode is a copyrighted work, and a full transcript is a reproduction of that work in another medium. Posting one without permission is not a grey area just because you did the typing. If you want to publish, ask the show — many will say yes and some will thank you for it.

Quoting briefly with attribution and a link is the normal, safe path for anything public.

Doing it on a phone

If the recording is happening on an iPhone, Record and Transcribe (our app) records and transcribes in one step — audio is written to disk continuously as it captures, so an hour-long episode playing out while your phone sits next to the speaker will not be lost to a lock screen or an interruption, which is how most long recordings die. Transcription runs automatically afterwards with each voice labelled.

Two practical notes for this specific job: check you have the storage and battery for the full episode length before you start, and expect the result to be good but not perfect — no transcription of speaker audio is, and names and technical terms are where errors concentrate.

Three transcriptions free, no card.

The order, one more time

Step	Cost	Effort
Apple Podcasts transcript	Free	Seconds
Spotify transcript	Free	Seconds
Show’s own website	Free	Two minutes
Ask the show	Free	An email
Record and transcribe it yourself	App or service	Real time + processing

The same rule holds for video: YouTube auto-captions most uploads and shows the transcript in a panel beside the player, so transcribing a YouTube video to text also starts with checking rather than converting.

Almost nobody needs step five. Try the first four.