Convert Your Audio Easily With The Best Do-It-Yourself Transcription Tools

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hi everybody. Welcome back to feed you'd brand. My name is Cody Hanafi. On behalf of Tom and Tracy Hazard, I will be taking over for today's subject. What I'll be talking about today is transcribing your podcast. Now, transcribing your podcast generates a text file that is shareable and searchable. Transcription is one of the best ways to improve your podcast and improve your podcast's SEO opportunity. SEO basically is your search engine optimization. And in simple terms, all that means is the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business or your podcast, in your case, such as Google, Bing, all the search engines. So the better visibility that your pages have in search results, the more, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract perspective and existing customers to your podcasts. So basically why SEO is important to try to take care of something is poditized. Clients understand this. We provide this as a service. We create what we call verbal SEO blog posts. And basically what those do is it's a transcription of your podcast. What we do is we take that and throw it into an embedded blog post along with Google Images, other different quotes that we'll put in. We'll embed the MP3 file from your show into the blog post as well, too. Now, the reason why we created as a blog post is because this is going to make sure that your SEO optimization is set up for success and set up for the most optimization you can with keyword searches and making sure that people who don't know your podcast already can find you. Every day, people are searching on terms all day long, every single day, different terms. And you might be talking about those. And you want to make sure that you're found by those specific people as well, too. So that's why transcribing and turning these into blog posts are very, very important for your searchability and overall engagement with people that don't already know your show or know your content. And you're talking about things that possibly people would really love to know about. So we want to expand your reach to the unlimited amount of people out there that are searching on topics every single day. Now, transcription also makes your content widely accessible. So what's really important is that it makes your show accessible to those who are deaf, who have hearing impairments, or speak another language as well too. I found an article recently, this is super important. I thought this would be very, very important to share as well too, as I found an article recently and it's with the Disability Rights advocates or the DRA and the National association of the Deaf or the NAD. And I found this on dralegal.org and basically what happened in December 14, 2021 in New York, the National association of the Deaf, or NAD and Disability Rights Advocates or dra, filed a lawsuit against three major providers of podcasts. Those providers were Sirius xm, Stitcher, and Pandora to end their exclusion of deaf and hard hearing Americans from each company's extensive podcast streaming service. So basically, the article goes and because defendants do not make transcripts or captions available for any of the podcasts offered on their platforms, more than 48 million deaf and hard hearing Americans are denied full and equal enjoyment of the content that they offer hearing users. These failures to provide equal access violate the Americans with Disabilities act as well as state and local New York law. I highly recommend you check that out to really understand that the there's many communities out there that utilize transcripts because they want to be involved with the podcasting world as well too. And transcripts make that available for these different communities, which is very nice. I would check out Lawsuit Challenges Inaccessibility of Major Podcast Platforms. That's the title of the article. I wish to check that out.

Now, not only is it important for the different types of communities out there to provide a transcript so they can kind of read and everything, but but it's just important for your searchability options within the Google search engine and all the different search engines. So we want to optimize SEO as much as we possibly can. Best way we can do that is transcriptions. Now for the Done for you clients with Potitize, these are services that we already applied to you. So what I'm coming on today to talk about is for you DIY customers, the people that like to edit and transcribe all of their own podcast episodes and that we just upload the podcast episodes for you and get them syndicated. I have a couple tools for you to take a look at. Now you might be thinking, what tools should I use? Right? There are many tools available. I want to start with a really unique tool that we found recently, Whitney Lauritson showed the team this and it's actually pretty unique. And basically all you have to do is take the audio, drag it into the software interface, give it time to upload, and it takes a few minutes. And your transcription, it's ready to go. This tool is called Edit Eddy. You can find it edited.

And it's a free thing. You just sign up, you enter in all of your signup information and then all you do is drag your audio into the software, give it that time to upload, and it gives you a transcription in a few minutes. Actually, it's easy, it's free, and it's a new tool from Headliner, so I definitely would check that out. There are a couple things with the interface as well too. It's a little bit hard to edit everything with ease. Now it takes a minute for you to kind of get involved with the audio editing process in this as well too. So there's a little video that plays while your audio is uploading to the interface and it shows you how to navigate through it. You can edit and take everything out. And it's pretty seamless as well too. Now another type of software that's out there is called descript. Descript is a time saving software with a drag and drop features and is a tool that you can essentially use to record and edit your entire podcast by yourself. So Descript is actually an audio and video editing platform as well. It's not only something that takes already made audio and transcribes it, it's an actual interface you can use to record your podcast episode as well too. So descript currently offers a Mac app as well as human powered transcription services, which costs a little bit more, but we'll get into that. Now what's really cool about descript is you can take a multi track and put it to one transcription. So a multi track voice transcription. So basically what that means is if you have two speakers, three speakers, more than one speaker, you can upload the separate voice transcriptions and it'll put it into one document altogether. It's really awesome. You can record your podcast, like I said, directly in the platform. So that makes it easier for people that don't have that platform or the recording tools or the means to get your podcast out there as well too. I would highly recommend checking out descriptive. You want kind of like that one platform that does it all as well. Right. What's really cool about Descript as well is you can multitask while you edit. So it has this great feature when you Delete a text, it deletes that actual whole section of audio from the audio file that you uploaded as well too. So it makes it easy for you to edit your audio, edit the transcription, and make sure that your show sounds and looks as seamless as you possibly can, all from one interface. It's really neat. You can also add music to your audio with all the different multi track functions. It's pretty cool. All you have to do is just take the video clip and in your timeline, you'll see in the interface when you go look at the script, you'll be able to edit it and put it in the timeline and it puts over just music, different things over what you've already said as well too, all in the same interface.

Now, while I was diving into the Descript, I found out that there was this really, really neat tool to also utilize. And it's not necessarily for everyone, but I thought it would be really cool to kind of touch on it a little bit. It's called Overdub. And what Overdub is, it's a deep fake AI technology that takes your voice and anytime you type text to it, it understands that that's going to be your voice being said and it makes it sound like you're saying that. So all you have to do is type, type, type, throw it into the overdub and what it'll do, it'll take that text and make it an audio version of that text that sounds just like you. Now all you have to do is you have to go through this process to where you read a script that they provide. And it takes about 30 minutes for you to read this random script that that descript has provided for you. That way it gets to know your voice. It gets to know all the, the odds and everything that you do with your voice as well too. It's really neat. So it'll take that and it'll make any text that you type sound close to yourself. It's not seamless. It's not a very, what I would call professional sounding audio. It definitely does sound like voice to text sometimes. So it's something that I don't recommend you using for the entirety of a podcast. Typing it out and then making it really accessible for people to listen to. But what's really cool, it just generates audio of your own voice without even recording. So why that would be important would be is if you forgot to say something or if you wanted to touch on something a little bit more and you weren't able to talk about that, it makes it super easy for you to just go in, type something out and add something that you wanted to patch up stuff that you wanted to say earlier and make it. Instead of plugging in all of your equipment and recording again and then taking it out and then recording a whole new episode, this can be something that you use to easily just add what you wanted to add instead of going around and making sure that you have the correct audio recording by starting all over. Because we would hate that. So this is a really neat tool. It's called Overdub. I would definitely check that out as well too. Now with descript, you can also create audiograms, upload them to social media. So it'll take a section or whatever sections you would like. It would take that piece of audio, put a whole background image to it with little waveforms, and then you'll be able to upload it to all the different types of social media. You can upload it to YouTube, Instagram, anything that you wanted to upload it to. Now it comes down to the pricing of descript. Like I said, Edit Eddy is a completely free interface that you can use and it's got its complications with editing. So with descript, I talked about a lot of really cool game changing things here. So there's a couple different tiers of pricing. There's a free tier of pricing which comes with three hours of transcription and it has access to full video and audio editing. But note that if you're going to use the video editing tool in here for the free version displays a watermark overwatch. So you'll have to get a higher paying subscription package to get that watermark taken off. And it comes with that free trial of the Overdub technology, deep fake technology that I was talking about. Super neat. The next tier of pricing is called Creator and that comes with 10 hours a month of transcription audio capability. So you get 10 hours a month. It takes that watermark off the video as well too. And that's going to be $12 a month. Then they have their pro tier pricing which is 30 hours of transcription. It gets those audiograms that I was talking about, the unlimited access to that Overdub deep fake AI technology that I was also talking about. And it gives you that as well, custom drive and page branding to your brand and everything super seamless. And that's only going to be $24 a month. So that's basically descript. If you're looking for something that's like kind of an all in all tool to help you edit, record and upload all at the same time. This is a really cool seriously and easy to use and time saving game changer. Now if you're not used to all these other different interfaces, Zoom actually has uploaded their own version of a transcript as well too. So it's available for only business, education enterprise plans. So if you have a standard free version or the Pro version, you'll have to spend a little bit more money a month to get access to the Zoom feature. But it's pretty easy to use. What I'm going to do is I'm going to share my screen here. So for the listeners, I would definitely highly recommend checking out the blog post for this episode so that you can see all of what I will be showing here in the video. So it's pretty seamless. So once you're inside your actual interface here, you're going to go into your settings recording and scroll down here. And I know that I've shown the different options that you're able to utilize before. And so when you get here to the advanced cloud recording settings, there's a checkbox that you're able to check off right here and it creates an audio transcript of the show. Now it's not the most legible as in like a transcript that you want to be utilizing on a blog like style post for your SEO opportunities. It's mainly for just understanding what the audio transcript it does. It kind of does time marks for everything and who was speaking and everything. And it breaks it up pretty unnaturally for someone to kind of just read through a little bit. So it's not my number one suggestion to use for a transcription technology, but it's definitely available out there for you.

Now another one that's easy for you to use that a lot of people use is Otter AI. It's an automated meeting notes with audio recording. It transcribes text and highlights a summary. It creates automated meeting notes with AI, so Otter will type out your meeting notes in real time. That's a really cool thing about Otter Day AI is that they'll record everything that they have in real time. Now the Otter AI pricing is also a little bit different as well too, but I wanted to go through a couple of those. There's the basic plan which lets you transcribe and record live, lets you search and playback recordings, highlight and insert comments, and it's got all of those features for you at the basic free package. Now if you move up to Pro, that's $8 and 33 cents a month. So it's about a little under $9 a month. And it gives you the Otter Assistant for Zoom, so you'll be able to integrate the Otter AI with your Zoom platform as well too. So this is kind of why I was going through and going to touch upon Otter AI. Then there's the business one. So this is recommended for small teams and organizations that need to share and collaborate, and that's at $20 a month. That gives you team collaboration, features, prioritize support, an outline summary for their beta program, and it integrates the Otter Assistant for Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet all of that stuff. So that'll give you the unlimited access. The pro version, it gives you just a limited trial for that. So you'll need to get the business if you want to hook up your Otter AI subscription with your Zoom, so you can get transcriptions there with ease as well too. So they have a phone app as well too. So Otter AI, they have a phone app. And so what you could utilize that phone app for is the recording of your transcript in real time as well too. So you can kind of get on your normal setup where you're recording normally into your microphone onto your whatever interface you're utilizing to record the audio, and then set up your phone right next to you. And they have a phone app, so you record your podcast like normal. You have your phone out with the app open to record, and in real time, it'll be transcribing your episode or whatever you're saying in real time with that and what you said immediately. And it'll take that and it'll have it in real time for you. So that's a way that you can utilize that as well too. So that's basically all I had to go over with you today is kind of showcase a couple different software and technologies that help you use this tool and utilize transcribing for your audio and make it easy for you to upload these to your different website pages and make sure that you can get a transcribed version of your podcast out there for everyone to be able to help your searchability and for the different communities that are out there. Thank you so much for taking time to listen to this episode. As always, this was freed your brand and we hope you have a great day.

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