Benefits of Podcast Transcriptions – PCI 382

Speaker 0 00:00:00 One thing that's that's cool about the transcripts that we offer here at Blueberry is that you can choose a different language, right?

Speaker 1 00:00:06 Yeah. You can do, I believe, four or five different languages with the auto transcripts that we have here. And Apple's going to, I think, create four languages. Not translate them, but if say you were doing a span, a Spanish show, then your transcript would be in Spanish, and that's, it'd be the same with us. And, and what's nice about what Apple is doing is if you don't have a transcript already in your feed, they're gonna auto generate one.

Speaker 0 00:00:36 That's really cool.

Speaker 1 00:00:37 Now, their transcripts, we, we don't know the quality of them yet.

Speaker 3 00:00:42 You're listening to Podcasts Insider, hosted by Mike Dell, Todd Cochrane, and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow and thrive through podcast. All with the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting. Welcome. Let's dive in.

Speaker 1 00:01:02 Hi, I am Mike Dell, VP of Customer Relations here at Blueberry.

Speaker 0 00:01:06 And I'm Mackenzie Bennett, marketing specialist here at Blueberry with Apple supporting transcripts soon. Today we decided we should go over wide Transcripts are helpful and a few different ways to handle them.

Speaker 1 00:01:20 Yeah, it's quite opportune that, uh, apple came out just this week with with their plan to take on the transcriptions, which, uh, kind of helps with the argument that a lot of people have about the new podcasting 2.0 specs that, well, Apple's never gonna implement that , you know, well, they did. We were gonna talk about why transcriptions are, are, uh, good for your podcast.

Speaker 0 00:01:50 We believed all of this before Apple, but even more so now. So one of those first things is probably the easiest one is just improved accessibility. It makes your content accessible and available to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, or people who are just preferred to be able to read along with whatever they are listening to.

Speaker 1 00:02:11 Right? Yeah. A lot, a lot of times it isn't just hearing impaired, but it's people that are learning English as a second language or whatever language you're in.

Speaker 0 00:02:19 That's a really cool one.

Speaker 1 00:02:20 Yeah, they're learning it as a second language, so it's kind of nice for them to see it on screen. When I was learning, Icelandic used to go to movies that were in English, but had Icelandic subtitles it, it helped actually to kind of put what they're saying and what, what it is in the other language together, but also enhanced SEO. Now, transcripts as your show notes generally don't help you because there's a lot of filler words and all that, but what's nice about having the transcript available is the search engines can find some things inside your episode, which is, which is nice. And in some apps, in fact, when Apple rolls this out, I guess next month in March, they're gonna be rolling this out with a new iOS and you'll be able to search within the episode, search the transcript.

Speaker 0 00:03:18 I think that's something people have been waiting for, for a very long time.

Speaker 1 00:03:21 Yeah, it's not a really a good audio search engine out there. I mean, there's people that have tried it, but it's really a hard one to do without a transcript engagement. Some listeners prefer reading the listening, so that's kind of nice. I know a guy that does a blog and, and a podcast, but the blog and the podcast were not the same. And what he did was he decided that some of his old articles would be good podcast episodes, so he literally reads his old blog posts and puts those out as a podcast episode, but people that want it can use the transcript or go to the original blog post and just read it. So, you know, there's it, it's for everybody.

Speaker 0 00:04:11 Yeah, all of this to say that Als that people just learn differently as well. It's gonna create the engagement just because they feel like they are able to actually properly consume the information in a way that they are comfortable. And that goes along with the accessibility as well. So it all, it all comes together at some point,

Speaker 1 00:04:34 Right? Another one is repurposing your content. If your content lends itself to maybe doing an ebook or articles for other websites or whatever, you can heavily edit your your transcript and uh, turn it into a written content.

Speaker 0 00:04:56 You don't have to use it verbatim. You can use it as a jumping off point, just the idea that like so many people are doing like a side hustle type thing with their podcast or they realize like, this part's going really well, so I might as well take advantage of it. Strike while the fire's hot type of situation. So this just makes your life a whole lot easier.

Speaker 1 00:05:20 I talked about before with the, uh, non-English speaking audiences, having a transcript makes it easier to translate the content into other languages because if it's written or typed or whatever, it's, it's a lot easier to translate. They could throw that into Google Translate and get a rough idea of what you're talking about.

Speaker 0 00:05:39 One thing that's that's cool about the transcripts that we offer here at Blueberry is that you can choose a different language, right?

Speaker 1 00:05:45 Yeah. You can do, I believe four or five different languages with the auto transcripts that we have here, and Apple's going to, I think, create four languages, not translate them, but if say you were doing a span, a Spanish show, then your transcript would be in Spanish and that's, it'd be the same with us. And, and what's nice about what Apple is doing is if you don't have a transcript already in your feed, they're gonna auto generate one

Speaker 0 00:06:15 That's really cool.

Speaker 1 00:06:17 Now, their transcripts, we, we don't know the quality of them yet. Ours are certainly good. And if you say use a script or something like that to create your own transcript, you could put that into the system in blueberry, and Apple will take that script or that transcript over their own. The only time they're ever gonna do their own is if you don't include one. So it's a, it's a nice homage to, to what's been happening with Podcast 2.0 and, and some of these new tags. And this is just the, the first of them that Apple is looking at. Actually the second one, they, they do follow the text tag as well, but that's a weird use case.

Speaker 0 00:06:56 Speaking of podcasting 2.0, though we were very excited when we heard about this announcement. Myself and Todd were actually at Pod Fest in Orlando when we found out. And then like two days later, Todd gave his session on podcasting 2.0. He kind of did just like a broad overview of how it works and why it's important and essentially how companies such as Blueberry are responsible for implementing some of these tags at our own discretion. But it just, it really hammered home that this has momentum and is really being implemented in an important way. And you know, hopefully down the line we'll see some others that are worthy as well. But I think this is just like a big step in that direction.

Speaker 1 00:07:46 Yeah, I'm looking at your list here of, of the benefits of transcripts can be used as part of a premium content offering. I never even thought of that one. That's a good one.

Speaker 0 00:07:58 Oh yeah. Well, I mean, even so like doing a premium content offering, you could do a show like you, we offer a premium show, which is not exactly what you were talking about, but we do premium episodes here where you can do like an ad free one or an early release or something and or just

Speaker 1 00:08:17 Bonus content.

Speaker 0 00:08:19 Yeah, bonus content. And for some people, if, if you don't really care about doing the transcripts for every episode saying like, just do it for this one because it might be like a specific topic that might be a lot easier for people to read along with, that might be cool.

Speaker 1 00:08:36 Yeah, for sure. And again, you could make an ebook out of say, a season of your episodes and edit it a bunch. 'cause transcripts are never perfect.

Speaker 0 00:08:47 Yeah, exactly. Especially right now. Majority of them are done by AI and they're, they're not gonna be a hundred percent. You can go in and edit them if you would like, but when they're coming from a service, unless you're paying a decent dollar amount, you're not gonna get something that is perfected by human. That's just the way that it is right now. Yeah.

Speaker 1 00:09:08 And it's getting better. We're, we're working on improvements to our system and everybody else is working on improvements to their systems. So the, the auto transcripts will probably improve over the next few years, I'm guessing 'cause AI seems to be taking over the world. ,

Speaker 0 00:09:25 We know they will regardless of my feelings of AI some days I see the benefits of them for accessibility reasons for sure.

Speaker 1 00:09:35 Oh yeah, for sure. But that's, I think that's the reason that a lot of these outfits are adding transcripts and closed captioning and, and all that. Uh, famously SiriusXM got sued a few years ago about the same time we came out with podcast or with transcriptions , ironically, right. So now if you are using the SiriusXM app and you're listening to a talk show, it will auto transcribe it for you. Same thing with Spotify and now Apple. So I, I think that was part of the impetus to get this done, but it's just the right thing to do anyway.

Speaker 0 00:10:10 Yeah, I, yeah, I remember back in our, uh, 2024 predictions. I definitely said accessibility was gonna be one of 'em, and I just didn't think that Apple was gonna come out with that so soon.

Speaker 1 00:10:23 . Yeah. And it's, and it's great. We haven't talked to the team yet directly or I haven't, but definitely want to congratulate Ted and the team over there for, for doing this. And, and in the way that they did it, they could have just said, now we're just gonna auto transcript everything and ignore what you put in your feed. And they didn't. So they're championing the RSS spec, which is nice, you know, 'cause RSS is what keeps podcasting free and open.

Speaker 0 00:10:48 Today we're, when we're recording this, I actually got an email from Apple this afternoon and that they are doing a, kinda like a creator session or just, it's called a What's new at Apple podcast session on Friday, February 9th to really go over like what, how this is gonna work. But they're doing sessions in French, German, Spanish, and English on how the transcript will make your show more accessible. How will

Speaker 1 00:11:16 Help the English one is at 7:00 AM our time.

Speaker 0 00:11:19 Yes.

Speaker 1 00:11:23 Have to get up early for that one.

Speaker 0 00:11:25 So I think if people are really interested, they should definitely check that out. I, we will obviously be participating in that as well on the, on the same side that you are. We're still learning how this is gonna work and factor into blueberry. Yeah,

Speaker 1 00:11:39 Like I said, we're already set up for it here at Blueberry, so take advantage of it. If you can get a transcript or you wanna sign up for our transcript service, we put it in there automatically for you. An SRT format. Well, although we may be changing, changing that, let's not get too geeky, but there's another format that's slightly newer and, and better that, uh, we'll be able to provide. But, uh, SRT will work and that's closed captioning. So even on Apple now, the way it I saw in the little demo video that I saw, it highlights the text as you speak, like our player does.

Speaker 0 00:12:15 Yeah, I think that's really cool.

Speaker 1 00:12:16 Yeah, it's pretty slick and maybe we inspired them to do that. I don't know. , I'd like to think so.

Speaker 0 00:12:23 I'd like to think it was considered .

Speaker 1 00:12:25 Yeah, very cool on their part. We don't give Apple enough kudos sometimes because they're the, the, the big bad bear in the room. And it's not all about Apple Podcasts, but I'm telling you this is big for, for the indie podcaster as well as the big companies and whatnot. And, and I, I think it's, I think it's a good sign.

Speaker 0 00:12:52 We have like one or two other points that we think are beneficial, one of which is data analysis and insights of using the transcript for figuring out like what exactly are the, the interests. What can you be using this for to like shape your show in the future? Not necessarily for like the audience, but for you to be reviewing as well. A lot of people don't like listening to their own podcast , so once they get done editing or even if they're not the one editing, they, it's kind of just like in your mind and then it's gone besides the, the before prep

Speaker 1 00:13:31 And you can put the transcript into an AI and have it analyze it.

Speaker 0 00:13:35 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 00:13:37 Stack really handy. That way they could tell you, oh, what's the, what's the, the different break points in the create your show notes. There's a whole bunch of things you can do with AI more on that coming up in the future. So the transcript is like the first piece of that. So it helps you with even production. So, or at least post-production.

Speaker 0 00:13:58 Speaking of post-production, you can definitely use this for social media. Everyone talks about sound bites and clips nowadays. You grab someone's attention, this can go along with that. The transcript, you have your little clip, video, audio bite, whatever you wanna call it. If you add the captions on it onto it as well, it's gonna get noticed more. It's just will and it's gonna be more broadly accepted.

Speaker 1 00:14:24 And the transcripts that that we provide, you can actually, they're timestamped. So if you find a cool quote in the transcript, you, you can go to that in the audio and cut that audio out for what behind your video and just makes producing social content fairly easy or at least easy to find what you're looking for.

Speaker 0 00:14:47 Yeah. Especially if you have a long episode, that is really gonna be your friend .

Speaker 1 00:14:51 Yeah, we always have a little stinger at the beginning or a cold open I guess at the beginning of these episodes. And our editor painstakingly edits our audio and she finds the little quotes to stick at the beginning. Well, you could do that yourself using a transcript if that's what you wanted to do. So, but anyway, transcripts are a great thing and just know that blueberry is supporting it. Uh, 100% will be 100% compatible with anything Apple's doing. And yeah, any final notes there, Mackenzie?

Speaker 0 00:15:24 No notes. Just I think that transcripts offer a lot of value for your podcast and I think that people should do one.

Speaker 1 00:15:30 Yes. And uh, like I said, yeah, they can be cheap, free or, or whatever, but , get them

Speaker 0 00:15:36 . Alright, thanks guys.

Speaker 3 00:15:39 Thanks for joining us. Come back next week and in the meantime, head to podcast insider.com for more information to subscribe, share, and read our show notes. Check out the latest suite of services and learn how Blueberry can help you leverage your podcast. Visit blueberry.com. That's blueberry without the ease because we can't afford the ease.