I occasionally read and respond to questions on various podcasting subreddits over at Reddit. I try to be a helpful human, when I can. 😃 I recently came upon a question that asked, "How can I automate the transcription of my podcast episodes by using IFTTT or Zapier?"
There were the obvious responses like, you can use Descript, Otter.ai, or Temi. Mainly folks mentioned the various transcription services one can use. But nobody directly addressed the automation part of the question (at least not at the time I read the post).
However, someone did mention the idea of converting your audio podcast into a video to upload to YouTube. Then by using YouTube's video transcription service, you can create the transcript for your podcast episode. Which made me ponder this question a little bit more.
What if you could automate the upload of your podcast episodes to YouTube? Then, a few hours after your podcast episode (now video) is live, you can grab the YouTube generated transcript. That would be a pretty close resolution to the redditor's problem. So, what if? Can it be done?
Wellllll, as a user of Libsyn (a podcast host) you can set up your podcast so that whenever you publish a new episode, it uploads as a video to your own YouTube channel - automatically! If you aren't a Libsyn user, you can do something similar using Repurpose.io, whereby you can hook up your podcast feed and have episodes upload automatically to YouTube. Once your video is up on the platform for a few hours, you can head over to watch the video and open the transcript.
So, yes, you can automate the transcription of your podcast episodes in this way. Sure, it's not going to be perfect or pretty, but my theory proved to be true.
Good-bye five clicks to get a transcript for your podcast episodes and hello efficiency!
In summary - the hack:
Step 1: Setup your Libsyn account to have a YouTube Destination OR set up a service like Repurpose.io so that your podcast episodes can be converted into a video and uploaded to YouTube whenever you publish a new podcast episode.
Step 2: Visit your YouTube account a few hours after the video has published, open the transcript (select the 3 ellipses to the right of the Save button), and copy/paste the transcript into a document. Check out this quick video showing you where and how to 'download' YouTube video transcripts.
Step 3: Pat yourself on the back for becoming an efficient and more productive podcaster.