Transcribe Podcast Episodes — Free

Most podcast transcription tools ask you to upload an audio file. This one does not accept files at all — it works from a video URL: YouTube, TikTok or Instagram. That makes it the fastest option if your episode is already on YouTube, and the wrong option if it isn't. Being clear about that up front saves you a wasted attempt.

• Your episode is on YouTube — paste the URL and you have the transcript in seconds. Nothing to export, install or upload.
• Your episode is only on Spotify or Apple Podcasts — this tool cannot reach it. Upload the episode to YouTube first (unlisted works), or use a tool built to read those platforms directly.
• You have a raw audio file — an MP3 or WAV sitting on your drive is not something this tool can take. A general audio transcription service is the right choice.

Doing this at volume? If you have a back catalogue to work through, or audio files rather than YouTube URLs, email support@transcribevideo.ai with the number of episodes and the format you have. We will tell you honestly whether we can help — it is not something the tool does automatically today.

Apple Podcasts also generates transcripts automatically for episodes distributed there, which is worth knowing before you reach for any third-party tool — if all you need is a transcript for listeners, that may already be handled.

Video is now a first-class podcast distribution channel rather than an afterthought, and most shows publish full episodes to YouTube for discovery. Once that upload exists, it is the shortest path to a transcript.

The conventional workflow — export the audio, upload it, wait for processing, download a transcript file, open it — has four steps where something can stall, and each one happens at the busiest moment of your publishing week. Pasting the URL of a video you already published collapses that to one step, and it costs nothing on episodes of ten minutes or less.

The honest caveat is duration. Podcast episodes are long, and the free tier is capped at 10 minutes per video and 2 videos per request. A typical 40-minute episode needs Pro ($13.50/mo), which removes the duration cap and raises the batch to 10 videos per request — which is also what makes back-catalogue work practical.

If your show is an interview or a co-hosted conversation, know this before you build a workflow on it: the transcript comes back as one continuous block of text with no speaker labels. It will not say "Host:" and "Guest:".

That is a real constraint, not a settings toggle. Separating voices — speaker diarization — is a genuinely hard problem that fails hardest on exactly what podcasts are full of: interruptions, crosstalk and two people talking at once. Tools that do offer it still mislabel overlapping speech.

In practice, for a two-person show the turn boundaries are usually obvious from the content, and adding "Host:" and "Guest:" while you edit takes a couple of minutes. A useful trick borrowed from interview transcription: if you control the recording, have each speaker say their name at the top of the episode — it gives you an unambiguous anchor for the first few turns, after which the pattern is easy to follow.

If speaker labels are non-negotiable for your workflow, choose a tool that advertises diarization rather than working around this one.

A published episode should produce more than one asset. The transcript is what makes that cheap:

1. Show notes. Pull the topics in order, the guest's background as they describe it, and every resource, book or link mentioned aloud — those are the items listeners most often come back hunting for.
2. A companion blog post. Podcast audio is invisible to search. A written version of the episode's core argument is how the conversation becomes findable. Edit for the eye rather than the ear: spoken language repeats and circles, so cut hard.
3. Quote graphics and clips. Scan the transcript for the two or three lines that stand alone without context — these are what work on social.
4. A newsletter edition. One idea from the episode, expanded in a few paragraphs, with a link to listen.
5. Subtitles. Every result includes .srt and .vtt downloads with real timestamps, free. Upload the .srt in YouTube Studio to replace YouTube's auto-captions with a proofread version.

Working through a back catalogue rather than a new episode? Batch the URLs and treat the archive as an SEO asset — older episodes often answer evergreen questions that still get searched.