PodcastTranscript AIThe honest answers.
Before you wonder,
before you worry.
01 — The basics
You paste a Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or RSS link and we turn the episode into clean, readable text you can scan, search, copy, or chat with. No account needed for standard transcripts — just paste and go.
Accuracy typically lands in the 92–98% range for clear English audio. Heavy accents, multiple overlapping speakers, poor microphones, background music, or niche jargon can lower that. We don't promise a perfect verbatim legal record — we promise something very close to what a human would write after listening carefully.
Most episodes finish in 2–6 minutes, depending on length and server load. A 3-hour interview takes longer than a 20-minute daily briefing. If a job seems stuck for more than 15 minutes, refresh the page — it's usually already done.
No. Transcribing is free and anonymous. You only need an account if you want to save a personal history of transcripts, use AI chat beyond the free limit, or upgrade to Premium.
02 — Legality & fair use
Yes — for personal use. Transcribing audio you're legally allowed to listen to, for your own reading, note-taking, accessibility, study or research, is generally considered fair use in most jurisdictions.
What you shouldn't do: republish the full transcript as your own content, sell it, monetize it, or pass it off as your own work. That crosses from fair use into copyright territory and becomes the podcast owner's call, not ours.
Rule of thumb: if you wouldn't photocopy a whole book and sell it, don't do the equivalent with a transcript. Read it, learn from it, quote it fairly — you're fine.
Sharing a link, a quote, or a short excerpt — yes, that's normal fair use. Sending the full transcript as a file so your friend never has to visit the original podcast? That's closer to distribution and we'd ask you not to. Credit the podcast and link back when you quote.
We cache public podcast transcripts so the next person asking for the same episode gets an instant result instead of re-running the job. We do not sell transcripts, and we do not use them to train third-party AI models. See our Privacy Policy for the full detail.
03 — When things fail
Failures almost always come down to one of these — and none of them mean the tool is broken:
- Private or paywalled episode. Patreon-only, subscriber-only Apple Podcasts+, Spotify-exclusive premium shows — we can't reach what the platform hides behind a login.
- DRM-protected audio. A small number of shows encrypt their streams. Our pipeline can't decrypt, and we won't.
- Broken or dead RSS feed. Some older podcasts point to files that no longer exist on the host's servers. If the audio isn't there, nothing can transcribe it.
- Geo-restricted content. Certain shows are limited to specific countries. If our servers are blocked, the fetch fails.
- Very long episodes. Marathon 6+ hour episodes occasionally time out. Try again during off-peak hours, or split if possible.
- Temporary rate limiting. Spotify and Apple sometimes throttle us when too many people hit the same episode at once. Wait a few minutes and retry.
If you see a failure, the first thing to try is simply retrying once. If it fails a second time, the issue is probably on the platform's side, not ours.
Speech recognition is statistical, not magic. It struggles most with: proper names it's never heard, technical jargon, rapid crosstalk, very quiet speakers, and heavy background music. The reading flow is usually still clear — you'll just spot the occasional odd word.
If accuracy matters for a specific quote, always double-check it against the original audio before citing it.
Yes. If Premium didn't deliver what you paid for — AI chat broken for you, repeated transcript failures on a working feed, double-charged — email us from the account you paid with and we'll sort it out. We'd rather refund a frustrated user than fight them. See the contact page.
04 — AI chat & Premium
Every AI chat message runs against a large language model, and each message costs us real money — for the model call, the compute, and the infrastructure around it. A single power user can easily burn through more in AI usage than a month of Premium covers.
The free tier gives you a generous taste so you can see if it's useful. Premium exists so that people who lean on AI chat every day can actually fund it.
Premium gets you:
- Unlimited AI chat with every transcript — ask questions, summarize, pull quotes, compare episodes.
- Priority processing so your jobs jump the queue during busy hours.
- Clean exports in formats you can actually work with.
- A direct line to us when something breaks.
Honestly — the real reason is simpler. AI costs money. Premium is how we keep the free tier free for everyone else. If the tool is useful to you, subscribing is the most direct way to keep it alive.
You keep everything you already transcribed. Your account stays, your history stays, your saved transcripts stay. You just drop back to free-tier AI chat limits and standard processing priority.
Yes. One click from your profile. No phone calls, no retention forms, no guilt trips. Cancel whenever, rejoin whenever.
05 — Still have questions?
We read every message. Send it via the contact page and be specific — the podcast link, what you expected, what happened instead. Bug reports that let us reproduce the problem get fixed fastest.
Of course. Paste the link into the homepage and transcribe it — that adds it to the public library automatically. If you run into a failure, let us know and we'll take a look.
06 — And if we missed something
Real humans read every message. If something here didn't answer your question — or if you just want to tell us a podcast changed your mind about something — we'd love to hear it.