How to Get a Podcast Transcript (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or Any MP3)

Most podcasts already have a free transcript: Apple Podcasts and Spotify generate them automatically for many shows, and YouTube has one under almost every video podcast. When a show doesn't, you can find the episode's MP3 in its RSS feed and turn the podcast into a transcript yourself in about a minute. This guide covers every option, plus how podcasters can publish their own transcripts.

1Apple Podcasts transcripts

Apple Podcasts automatically creates a transcript for new episodes in English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. You need iOS 17.4, iPadOS 17.4 or macOS Sonoma 14.4 or later.

On iPhone and iPad

1. Open Podcasts and play the episode.
2. Open the Now Playing screen (tap the mini player at the bottom).
3. Tap the View Transcript button (a speech bubble with quotation marks) below the volume slider.

The text scrolls with the audio and highlights each word. Tap any paragraph to jump there. You can also open a transcript without playing: on the episode's page, scroll down to the Transcript section, or tap the More button (three dots) and choose View Transcript.

Search a transcript: on the Now Playing screen, swipe up on the transcript and tap Search. From the episode page, tap the Search Transcript button. The search options let you match whole words or capitalization.

Copy or share a quote:

• From the episode page, select text, then choose Copy, Share from the timestamp, or play from that point.
• From the Now Playing screen, touch and hold text, then choose to play or share from that point, or select text.

Apple limits copying to 200 words at a time, and shared quotes include a link to the episode. To get the full transcript in one go, use method 4.

On a Mac

1. Open the Podcasts app and play an episode.
2. Click the View Transcript button in the player.
3. To search, click the Search Transcript button. To share from a moment, select text, Control-click it, and choose Share from the timestamp.

You can also select an episode, scroll to its Transcript section, or click More›View Transcript.

Why there's no transcript: if the button is grayed out, that episode has none. Common reasons: the language isn't supported, the episode is brand new (Apple says to wait up to 24 hours), it's over 10 hours long, the creator turned transcripts off, or it's an explicit episode and you have content restrictions on. Transcripts aren't available in every country, and Apple leaves out song lyrics.

2Spotify podcast transcripts

Spotify auto-generates transcripts for many shows, but not all: the creator controls whether they appear, and Spotify is still rolling them out.

1. Open the Spotify app on your phone and play the episode.
2. Tap the mini player to open the Now Playing view.
3. Scroll down below the player controls. If the episode has one, you'll see a transcript card (labeled Transcript or Read along, depending on your app version). Tap it to read along.

Transcripts also show on the episode page in the mobile app. They're free for everyone, with or without Premium.

Limitations:

• Not every show or episode has one, and there's no way to filter for shows that do.
• You can read along but can't copy or export the transcript.
• Shows that are only on Spotify can't be downloaded or transcribed elsewhere. Most podcasts aren't exclusive, though: search for the same show in Apple Podcasts and use method 1 or method 4.

3YouTube podcast transcripts

Many podcasts now post full episodes to YouTube, and YouTube makes captions for nearly every video automatically.

On a computer

1. Open the episode on YouTube.
2. Below the video, click ...more to expand the description.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the description and click Show transcript.
4. The transcript opens beside the video. To hide the times, click the ⋮ at the top of the panel and choose Toggle timestamps.

To copy it, click and drag from the first line to the last, then press Ctrl + C (Cmd + C on a Mac). On a two-hour episode that's a lot of scrolling, so the faster route is our free YouTube Transcript tool: paste the link and get the whole transcript as text, with timestamps if you tick Include timestamps.

In the YouTube app

Tap the video's title to open the description, scroll down and tap Show transcript. The app doesn't let you select and copy the text, so paste the link into a transcript tool instead.

Limitations: if Show transcript is missing, the creator turned off captions, or YouTube couldn't make them. Auto captions have little punctuation and no speaker names.

4Transcribe any podcast episode free

When there's no transcript, or you want all of it as text you can copy, use our Podcast & MP3 to Text tool. It takes an Apple Podcasts episode link or a direct link to the audio file.

1. Copy the episode link. In Apple Podcasts, tap the More button on the episode, tap Share Episode, and copy the link from the share sheet. Or copy an MP3 link from the RSS feed (see method 6).
2. Open urltotext.com/podcast-to-text and paste the link.
3. Click Get transcript.
4. Click Copy, or Download to save it as a .txt file.

What to know:

• Links that work: Apple Podcasts episode pages, and direct audio links ending in .mp3, .m4a, .wav, .aac, .ogg, .opus or .flac (up to 150 MB). Spotify links don't work, because Spotify doesn't make the audio downloadable.
• Length: up to 15 minutes per episode without an account, or up to 60 minutes with a free account. Most podcasts run longer than 15 minutes, so sign in first.
• Speed: usually under a minute, using Whisper Large v3 Turbo speech recognition. The audio is deleted as soon as it's transcribed.
• Already downloaded the file? Upload it to Audio & Video to Text instead.

More from the same episode:

• Video Summarizer: paste the podcast link and get the key points and takeaways, plus the full transcript.
• Subtitle Generator: get a timed SRT or VTT file (useful for publishing transcripts, see below).
• Translate Video: read a podcast in another language in English, or any of 30+ languages.

Episode longer than an hour? Split it into parts with ffmpeg and upload each one, or use Whisper, which has no length limit:

ffmpeg -i episode.mp3 -f segment -segment_time 3540 -c copy part%02d.mp3

5Check the podcast's website and show notes

Before transcribing anything, check whether the show already publishes transcripts. Many interview, news and educational shows do.

1. Open the episode's page on the show's website (the link is usually in the episode description in your podcast app).
2. Look for a Transcript tab, link or section, often near the bottom of the show notes.
3. If you don't see one, search the web for "show name" "episode title" transcript.

Big publishers (NPR, The New York Times, many BBC shows) post transcripts on their sites, sometimes a day or so after the episode. Podcast hosts such as Buzzsprout, Transistor and Captivate can also publish a transcript page for each episode, so check the episode's page on the host's site too.

Need the text of a transcript page without the menus and ads? Paste its URL into URL to Text and tick Extract Only Main Content with AI.

6Find the episode MP3 in the RSS feed

Every public podcast is an RSS feed: a file listing each episode with a link to its audio. Once you have that link, any transcriber can use it.

Step 1: find the show's RSS feed

Pick whichever is easiest:

• From an Apple Podcasts link: the show's URL ends in an ID, like podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily/id1200361736. Put the number into this address: https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=1200361736&entity=podcast. Open it, and find "feedUrl" in the result. That's the RSS feed.
• With a free finder: paste the show's name or Apple Podcasts link into the Castos RSS feed finder and click search. It looks the show up in Podcast Index's directory of over 4 million podcasts.
• On Podcast Index: search for the show at podcastindex.org. The show's page lists its RSS feed.
• On the show's website: look for an RSS link or icon, often under Subscribe or Listen on.

Step 2: copy the episode's audio link

1. Open the feed URL in your browser. Chrome and Edge show the raw XML; Firefox may offer to download it, which is fine. Open the file in any text editor.
2. Press Ctrl + F (Cmd + F on a Mac) and search for the episode's title.
3. Just below the title, find the <enclosure url="..."> line. The address inside the quotes is the MP3.
4. Copy it. If it contains &, replace each one with &.

Paste that link into Podcast & MP3 to Text, or into your browser to download the file. Many feed links pass through tracking redirects (podtrac, chartable and similar) before reaching the MP3. That's normal, and they still work.

Tip: while you're in the feed, search it for podcast:transcript. If the show publishes transcripts, the tag links straight to the file.

7Transcribe podcast episodes with Whisper

For long episodes, a whole back catalog, or audio you'd rather keep on your own machine, run OpenAI's free, open-source Whisper model locally:

pip install -U openai-whisper
whisper episode.mp3 --model turbo --output_format all

You'll need Python and ffmpeg installed. Whisper writes .txt, .srt, .vtt, .tsv and .json files, so you get a plain transcript and timed captions in one run. The turbo model is fast on a GPU with about 6 GB of video memory; on a laptop without one, --model small is a good tradeoff. faster-whisper and whisper.cpp are quicker alternatives, especially on Macs. Our guide on how to transcribe audio to text has the commands.

Whisper doesn't label speakers on its own. For interview shows, add names by hand or use a tool with speaker detection.

For podcasters: how to publish your own transcripts

Transcripts make your episodes accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing listeners, let people skim and search, and give search engines and AI assistants text they can read. Audio alone isn't searchable; a transcript page can rank for every topic you discuss.

Apple Podcasts

Apple transcribes your new episodes automatically and labels them "Automatically generated". To show your own instead:

1. Make a VTT or SRT file. VTT lets you label each speaker, and Apple shows the name when the speaker changes.
2. Add it to your RSS feed with the transcript tag (most hosts do this for you when you upload a transcript). For subscriber-only episodes, upload the file directly in Apple Podcasts Connect.
3. In Apple Podcasts Connect, set the episode to Display transcripts I provide: select the episode, go to Audio and Transcripts, click Edit, choose Use a custom setting for this episode, and click Save. To change it for the whole show, use the transcript setting on the show's Availability tab.

Your transcript then shows "Provided by" and your show's name. Apple's tips: put host and guest names in your show and episode descriptions (it improves spelling), set the right language, and cover the full episode.

Spotify

In Spotify for Creators, go to Episodes, select one, click Details, find Transcript and click Edit. You can download Spotify's VTT, fix it, and Upload transcript (VTT or SRT, max 5 MB, with timestamps so it syncs). Turn auto transcripts on or off per episode with Display a transcript for this episode, or for the whole show under Settings›Transcripts. Note that turning auto-generated transcripts back on replaces one you uploaded. Transcripts aren't available to every creator yet.

Every other app: the podcast:transcript tag

The Podcasting 2.0 <podcast:transcript> tag links each episode to a transcript file. Apps such as Apple Podcasts, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts and Fountain read it. Declare the namespace on the <rss> element, then add the tag inside each <item>:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:podcast="https://podcastindex.org/namespace/1.0">
  ...
  <item>
    <title>Episode 42</title>
    <enclosure url="https://example.com/ep42.mp3" type="audio/mpeg" length="34216300"/>
    <podcast:transcript url="https://example.com/ep42.vtt" type="text/vtt"/>
    <podcast:transcript url="https://example.com/ep42.srt" type="application/x-subrip" rel="captions"/>
  </item>
</rss>

url and type are required. Supported types include text/plain, text/html, text/vtt, application/json and application/x-subrip. Add language="es" if the transcript isn't in the feed's language, and rel="captions" for a timed captions file. You can list several formats for the same episode.

In practice you rarely edit XML. Buzzsprout, Transistor, Captivate, RSS.com and most other hosts have a transcript upload field on each episode and add the tag for you. Spotify for Creators has a switch, Distribute transcripts across other platforms via RSS, under Settings›Transcripts.

Making the file: run the episode through the Subtitle Generator to get SRT and VTT files (60 minutes per run with a free account), or Whisper for longer episodes. Fix names and jargon before publishing.

For SEO: also post the transcript as text on the episode's page on your website, under the show notes. That's the version search engines index and people link to.

Frequently asked questions

Can you get a transcript of a podcast?

Yes. Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube show free transcripts for many episodes. For any other episode, paste its Apple Podcasts link or MP3 link into Podcast & MP3 to Text and copy the transcript. It's free.

How do I see the transcript of a podcast on Spotify?

Play the episode in the Spotify mobile app, open the Now Playing view and scroll down to the transcript card. If there isn't one, the creator hasn't turned transcripts on or Spotify hasn't generated one for that show yet.

Can I copy a transcript from Apple Podcasts?

Yes, in pieces. On the episode page, select text and tap Copy. Apple limits each copy to 200 words, and shares include a link to the episode. For the whole transcript, use a podcast transcriber.

Why don't I see transcripts in Apple Podcasts?

You need iOS 17.4, iPadOS 17.4 or macOS Sonoma 14.4 or later. The episode also has to be in a supported language, and new episodes can take up to 24 hours. Very long episodes, explicit episodes with content restrictions on, and shows whose creators turned transcripts off won't show one.

Can I transcribe a Spotify podcast?

Not from a Spotify link, since Spotify doesn't make its audio downloadable. Most shows are on other apps too: find the same episode in Apple Podcasts, copy its link, and paste it into Podcast & MP3 to Text. Spotify exclusives can only be read in Spotify's own transcript.

How do I find a podcast's RSS feed?

Take the ID from the show's Apple Podcasts URL and open https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=ID&entity=podcast, then copy the feedUrl. Or paste the show's name into the Castos RSS feed finder, or search on podcastindex.org.

How do I transcribe a podcast to text for free?

Paste the episode link into Podcast & MP3 to Text (free, up to 60 minutes with a free account), or run Whisper on your computer for unlimited free transcription.

Do podcast transcripts help SEO?

Yes. A transcript on the episode's web page gives search engines full text to index, so the episode can show up for the topics you talk about. Transcripts in your feed also make episodes searchable inside apps like Apple Podcasts.

Which method should you use?

• Just want to read along: the built-in transcript in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.
• Need the full text to copy: Podcast & MP3 to Text, or YouTube Transcript for video podcasts.
• No Apple link handy: find the MP3 in the RSS feed, then transcribe it.
• Hours of episodes: Whisper on your own computer.
• It's your show: publish VTT or SRT transcripts in your feed and on your website.