Today the entire Castos team is thrilled to announce that free podcast transcripts are now available to all customers.
This project, we dubbed “Transcripts For All” internally, is something we’ve been wanting to provide to the podcasting community for a long time. But until recently, it has been technologically and financially infeasible to offer.
But with recent advances in transcription technology, we’re able to harness the power of AI to bring transcripts to every podcast on the Castos platform, at zero cost to our customers.
Transcribe All Your Podcast Episodes
With Castos, you can transcribe all of your episodes, entirely for free.
Whether you’re just starting a new show or moving from another platform, you’re just a few clicks away from a better way to podcast.
Why Offer Transcripts Of Your Podcast
Providing transcripts for your podcast episodes is incredibly valuable for both you as the podcaster and your listeners. While audio is a wonderful medium for consuming content, transcripts make your show more accessible and discoverable.
Firstly, transcripts increase accessibility for those who are deaf or hard of hearing. By providing a text version of your audio content, you allow more people to enjoy your show who otherwise wouldn’t be able to. Offering transcripts shows that you care about inclusivity and accessibility by providing our content in multiple formats.
Additionally, transcripts improve your SEO and visibility of your podcast website. Search engines like Google can’t listen to audio files (yet!), but they can read text transcripts. Quality transcripts that include your keywords help your podcast get found more easily in search results. More discoverability means more listeners and downloads for your show.
Transcripts are also great for retention and recall. Someone who heard your episode might want to look back on a specific detail or quote. Skimming the transcript allows them to quickly find the part they want to revisit. Plus, reading along while listening can help reinforce the information for better memorization.
Finally, transcripts provide shareable quotes and moments from your podcast. Fans can easily copy and paste compelling passages to share on social media or link back to your episode. This gives you free promotion when transcripts contain viral soundbites.
How Transcripts Work
Within your Castos dashboard, you’ll first want to opt into transcription for each podcast you host on the platform.
Once you have enabled transcripts for your podcast, Castos will automatically transcribe new episodes for you once they are either Saved As Draft, Scheduled, or Published.
Castos AI Assistant
Within the new AI Assistant section of each podcast Settings field you have a few options around how Castos handles transcription of your show.
To begin with though, let’s enable transcripts for one of our episodes. If you navigate to the Settings area of a podcast, and choose the new AI Assistant tab you’ll see an area for Automated Transcripts.
Custom Vocabulary
These are customizable sections where you can set a Custom Vocabulary (a set of words you may often say on your podcast that you want to ensure are always transcribed correctly). If you’ve done any automated transcription in the past, you know that if it makes a mistake, it almost always makes the same mistakes all the time.
So, this is a great way to get around that.
Any words that are either transcribed incorrectly on your first episode or that you want to ensure are absolutely correct all the time (like a name), you can enter those in the Custom Vocabulary field.
Words only here, no punctuation or numerals, and a phrase needs to be less than 6 words. The Custom Vocabulary feature is available only in English for the time being, but updates are coming for other languages in our roadmap.
Speaker Diarization
Castos Transcripts automatically detects separate speakers within your episode and will Diarize those speakers separately so when reading the transcript, you always know when speakers switch.
Here’s an example from a recent episode of our own Creative Architects podcast, part of the Castos Originals network of shows:
Removing Filler Words
Don’t you just hate when you’re reading a transcript and every third word is “umm” or “ah”. No more!
By default, Castos Transcripts will automatically remove all filler words from your transcripts. Leaving you with just the most important, impactful parts of your episodes.
But of course, if you want to leave in every bit that was spoke, you can turn off the Filler Word Removal feature for Castos to transcribe every second of audio vertabim.
Supported File Types
Automatic transcripts are supported on any .MP3, .M4A, or .MP4 episode you publish. Episodes must be > 60 seconds in length to be transcribed.
Languages Supported
One of the best parts about Castos’ new free transcription program is that we support 19 languages out of the box. No settings to configure, no special parameters. These languages include:
- English (Australian, British, and US)
- Spanish
- French
- German
- Italian
- Portuguese
- Dutch
- Hindi
- Japanese
- Chinese
- Finnish
- Korean
- Polish
- Russian
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
- Vietnamese
Bringing not only free transcripts to all customers but also supporting many languages spoken across our platform opens up enormous opportunities for discoverability, inclusion, and accessibility for all podcasts on the Castos platform.
Plan Compatability
Castos Transcripts are included in every plan.
Within the Starter plan you’ll receive 10 episodes credits per month, on the Growth plan you’ll receive 25 episode credits a month, and on the Pro plan you’ll receive 100 episode credits per month.
1 episode credit = one file. No restrictions on the duration of the episode whatsoever.
Looking Ahead
Enabling automatic transcripts for your podcast is the first step towards making a more inclusive, accessible, and discoverable podcast for your audience.
But it’s not just the content you already have; transcripts unlock all sorts of opportunities around written, audio, and video content repurposing.
Without spoiling the surprise too much, be on the lookout for some incredible AI-powered content repurposing tools within your Castos dashboard in the coming months. It all starts with the transcript, so if you’re not transcribing your podcast already, what are you waiting for?
And if your current host doesn’t offer transcription automatically like Castos, come on over! Importing your podcast from another host is just a few clicks away.
