How to get a transcript of a podcast episode

You just heard the perfect quote in a podcast episode, and now you want it in writing. This should be simple, but it usually is not: the majority of shows never publish a transcript, and the ones that do often bury it on a page you cannot copy from cleanly. Audio is a one-way street. Once an episode is out, its content is invisible to search, skimming, and citation unless someone transcribes it.

Audio is a one-way street.

Why most shows skip transcripts

Transcribing an hour of speech by hand takes four to six hours of work, and automated services charge per minute, so a weekly show faces a real ongoing cost for something listeners rarely ask about out loud. Hosting platforms do not generate transcripts automatically either. The result is a strange gap: podcasts are full of quotable, referenceable material, and almost none of it can be quoted or referenced without replaying the audio and typing by ear.

hand transcription

4–6 hrs

to transcribe one hour of speech by hand

free AI transcription

15 min

every month with a free account, no credit card

tautau Base

200 min

for $3 a month, shared with the dictation quota

What a transcript unlocks

Text changes what an episode is good for:

• Quoting accurately. No more rewinding thirty seconds at a time to catch the exact wording.
• Show notes and summaries. Pull the structure of a long conversation out in minutes instead of re-listening.
• Search across episodes. Find the one where they discussed your topic without scrubbing through a back catalogue.
• Accessibility. Plenty of people would rather read an episode, or cannot listen to one. A transcript is the difference between included and excluded.
• SEO, if you are the podcaster. A published transcript turns an invisible hour of audio into a page a search engine can read.

How to transcribe an episode with tautau

The tool at tautau.xyz/transcribe accepts a podcast episode page link, the show's RSS or Atom feed (it picks up the latest episode), or a direct link to an audio file: mp3, wav, m4a, webm, or ogg. Paste the link, and a hosted speech model transcribes the audio. This is genuinely compute-heavy, so it is metered in minutes: a free account includes 15 minutes of audio transcription every month, no credit card, which covers the occasional episode. Regular transcribers can move to 200 minutes for $3 a month or 600 for $9, shared with tautau's dictation quota.

Long episodes take a few minutes to process, and the page shows a progress state while it works, so you can leave the tab open and come back. The finished transcript opens in a workbench where you can search, edit, and copy it, or download it as .txt or .md. If you are signed in, it also saves to your private history.

Honest expectations

Speech models are good, not flawless. A clean studio recording comes out well; a noisy remote interview with people talking over each other will need a proofread. Proper nouns are the classic weak spot of every speech model, so check the spelling of names before you quote them. And because the audio is really being processed, a two-hour episode takes minutes, not seconds. For anything you plan to publish, read the transcript against the audio once. It is a fast pass, but not a free one.

Getting started

Sign up free at tautau.xyz, open the transcript tool, and paste the episode you have been meaning to quote. Fifteen free minutes a month is enough to find out whether searchable podcasts change how you listen. And if your interest in speech-to-text runs the other direction, from your voice into text, the tautau Chrome extension puts a mic button next to every text field on the web. Install it from the Chrome Web Store; a free account gets you five dictations a day, no credit card required.