One of many greatest adjustments on this week’s launch of iOS 17.4 is transcripts in Apple’s Podcasts app — a function that’s prone to put it forward of the numerous different choices on the App Retailer for listening to podcasts.
Satirically, that is one space by which Apple looks as if it’s chasing Spotify, which introduced an identical function final fall. Nonetheless, as is normally the case with Apple, it will not be doing this primary, nevertheless it’s positively doing it higher.
Spotify’s podcast transcripts function has been largely caught in limbo. Even six months after it was introduced, it’s come to solely a choose handful of podcasts, with no clear rhyme or motive as to which of them qualify and which don’t. Additional, Spotify requires you to pay for an ad-free podcast listening expertise, whereas Apple Podcasts doesn’t.
Apple’s new podcast transcripts are universally out there on any episode that meets the necessities. Which means they must be in one of many supported languages — English, French, German, or Spanish — and have respectable sufficient audio high quality that Apple’s servers could make sense of what’s being stated. They’re additionally out there in over 170 nations, though just for podcasts within the 4 supported languages.
Not like most of Apple’s machine-learning options, podcast transcripts aren’t generated in your gadget in actual time; all of the heavy lifting is finished on Apple’s servers. That is smart since, in contrast to analyzing your private photographs, podcasts are public anyway, so there aren’t any privateness considerations right here.
Tips on how to Entry Transcripts in Apple Podcasts
To simplify issues, Apple has adopted the design of Apple Music in its Podcasts app, making pulling up a transcript for a podcast as simple as pulling up the lyrics for a track.
Whereas Apple plans to get each podcast in its catalog transcribed finally, that’s going to take a while. For now, it’s begun with the newest ones, and it’s working backward in time. Transcriptions may take as much as 24 hours to look for newly added episodes, so if the episode you’re listening to doesn’t have a transcript, simply give it a while.
As with lyrics in Apple Music, there are two alternative ways to view a podcast transcript. You’ll be able to both pull a transcript as much as learn the podcast with out listening to it or observe alongside on the Now Taking part in display. Right here’s how to do that:
- Find a current podcast episode you’d wish to see a transcript for.
- To learn the transcript with out beginning playback, press and maintain on the podcast episode and choose View Transcript. A static copy of the transcript will seem that you could scroll by.
- To see a transcript that follows alongside as you hear, start enjoying the episode, after which choose the quote bubble button within the bottom-left nook. The podcast transcript will probably be highlighted to match the speaker, phrase by phrase, and routinely scroll because it progresses.
In both mode, you may search by the podcast transcript by tapping the magnifying glass within the top-right nook or the Search button overlaid on the Now Taking part in display.
When listening to a podcast, tapping on a particular part will skip on to that a part of the podcast and proceed playback.
As Apple notes, it’s additionally constructed this function to reinforce accessibility, with font and coloration distinction designed to make transcripts simpler to scan and browse and the flexibility for many who are Deaf or arduous of listening to to entry transcripts with out having to press play on an episode.
Apple has packed in a couple of different intelligent tips behind the scenes. For instance, chapter titles will routinely be inserted into the transcripts for podcasts which have them, and Apple will pull host and visitor names from the present and episode descriptions to make sure that they’re spelled accurately within the transcripts at any time when they’re spoken.
Routinely generated transcripts may also be downloaded by podcasters as a VTT file from Apple’s Podcasts Join publishing platform. Which means that Apple is giving podcasters the good thing about its AI voice-recognition instruments at no further cost. The VTT is an open format, that means these Apple-generated transcripts may be uploaded to different podcast platforms, edited to right any errors or add issues like speaker names, after which linked as a publisher-provided transcript to override the routinely generated transcript. That’s an enormous win for world accessibility amongst podcasting platforms.