Stop Wasting Time Editing! Podcast AI Transcription Hacks From 10,000 Episodes

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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 feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

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Welcome to Feed your Brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host Tracy Hazard. Today we're going to talk about podcast AI transcription hacks from 10,000 episodes. And I don't think a lot of our listeners probably realize this at 10,000 episodes is actually, I think, oh, we've done at least double it, at least twice that. But in our business over the years, we recognize the value of using a transcript as the basis of a long form blog post for an episode for podcasters, just to amplify our message much wider and louder to get more people aware of our podcasts who are searching things in Google. There are many good reasons why that's the case. Part of it is the podcast search engines in the apps are lousy and they're only looking at the titles and descriptions of your show and your episodes.

Right. Let's tell the story about how this started because so Tom and I started our first podcast. We've told you many times on the show before. We started our first podcast in a geeky podcast on 3D printing called WTFF and we've now have over 650 episodes on it. We, I don't think we've published one in the last year at least, but it hasn't pod fade. When you reach over 500 episodes, I think you can call it complete. And so I don't consider it a pod faded show. I just think, you know, hey, we don't do a ton with 3D printing, so we don't keep the podcast live anymore. But we started that podcast and pretty much within a few months of starting it, we got a company that we hired to make us a website just for the podcast because it was confusing. Our regular design business that we had and to have the podcast in there was just a little confusing. It made it seem like our design business was all about 3D printing and it wasn't. And so we decided to have its own spinoff website and we started a website called 3D StartPoint, which you can go check out today. It still exists. 3DStartPoint.com and 3D Start Point was built by this agency that was going to build us a revenue generating website and they required us to put in 40 blogs. And I was supposed to write in which I had written lots of blogs in the other site, but I was supposed to write 40 blogs. And I got busy. I don't know, it got to be the end of the year. We were trying to launch the site and we launched it on Halloween and so we were trying to launch the site and then it got to be the holidays and I got really busy and, and I didn't have a ton of time to write the articles. So I'd only written like maybe a dozen of the 40 that I was supposed to write in the first few months. So I transcribed them and then from our podcast episode, from our podcast episode and then cleaned up the transcript and made it look like a blog with the intention that I would go back into it and rewrite it. Because that's sometimes how I did do articles was that I would take a transcript of a conversation and then turn it into an article and write it from there. So I had been doing that for a while and so this was prior to me working for Inc. Magazine, but it was like right at the same time period where I started to kind of follow this model. And so we wrote these 40 transcript style blogs, but they didn't look like your ordinary transcript, they didn't look like show notes like everyone else was doing in the industry. They look like a blog. And in January, Tom got a call from the head of the company who had been hired to do this revenue generating website. And what did he tell you?

He really said, what are you guys doing on this website? He was telling us that he was shocked, number one, because when you start a new website, usually it's in Google's penalty box because it doesn't know your site yet. It's new. It's more about a new domain name than it is a new website. But in this case it was both a new domain name and a new website. And usually it's in Google's penalty box for at least four months.

They call it the sandbox. And so if you've ever heard that term that your, your site is in the Google sandbo, that's what it's called. And it's like them testing out and making sure you're good to play with, right? You're safe to play with really.

When you think about it, a brand new site Google learns about, it doesn't know anything about it. It certainly doesn't trust it. It doesn't know what you're going to do? Are you going to be selling things on that site or not? Are you going to be providing valuable information or not? I mean, is it the site all about you or is it about providing value to people searching in their search bar? So it takes Google a while to look at your site and see what kind of patterns emerge about how often are you putting up new pages or new content, Is it any good? So that's why it takes like four plus months to come out of Google's. You know, I say penalty box, but yes, they do say sandbox Tracy. But still our site came out of it within 60 days. And they were shocked.

They never seen a site go that fast and then rank.

It was ranking really well with keyword rankings and unique visitors coming to the set every month. And like, what are you guys doing? And so Tracy was kind of ready to apologize to them because she hadn't written the blogs the hard way. And we had done this transcription thing they to create these blogs. And so we were asking them, well, so should we really write the blogs the hard way? And they said, no, no, no, no, keep doing what you're doing because it's working really well.

And then they and us together refined this process into what we consider to be, we call it our verbal SEO blog. So verbal search engine optimized blog, and that's what we call it. But it has always come from the transcript. So this started in 20. What year was that?

I can't even think it was 20 years ago.

2015.

2015.

2015. I think it was 2015. We've been doing this, like I said, almost a decade. We started in 2014 in terms of the like. But by the site time the site aired and it was happening at this rate, it was 2015. So we've been refining how that looks and how that works. And then very quickly we were using transcription services to get transcriptions. And we were doing the human transcribed version initially because it was better because the ones that were automated were terrible, like really bad back then. But they improved over time and in a couple of them. And then this is why I say we've been for eight years. We were approached by those companies that we'd been doing a lot of volume of episodes with them. They approached us and said, hey, would you be one of our beta testers and start out using our AI system? And we created APIs, automated ways of utilizing their AI system as the first pass. And then we still have a human transcription team, right? Like we still have I mean I think it's our largest team still today it's our largest team. So between that and blog we have. Those are our two largest teams at potitize. So we would have all these. It would take approximately, let's say you had 30 minutes of content. It would take us approximately four times that in a human review of that on average. Some are longer, some are shorter, but it's on average four times that for a human to run through that and review it. So you'd be doing basically two hours of work on top of a 30 minute episode if you think of it that way. So if you're not spending that much time on it, that's. Some of it is because AI transcription has gotten so much better over the years and we flip flop through many different versions of it. We are currently using Google speech to text and we abandoned rev. We did a bunch of other types over the years and various reasons cost some of it but also accuracy and how it formats also saves time for you as you do this. So this is something that you're going to want to experiment with is that there are multiple ways to do this, multiple things that you can utilize, but.

The purpose again just sort of to come back to sort of. The good reason why as a podcaster you want to do this. It's. It's the good reason why you want a website for your show and why you would want anything to do with a transcript. And it's just to convert your content into another medium that's going to get a lot more attention and exposure for your podcast and your show brand and. Or if it's part of your business, your business brand. Because there's only so many people that are going to find your content through a search in their listening app because they're only going through titles and descriptions of the shows and the episodes and even in YouTube, similar thing, as big as YouTube is, and as many great things as they do, everything that is said within your recording is still not a part of their search. So when you create this type of a blog on your website now you're opened up to being found by all the billions of people searching in Google search engine every day because they index this text and make it searchable in their search.

Yeah, so I want to clarify, right, because in YouTube you see captioning, you see automated transcriptions. You even see automated transcriptions in Apple and Spotify now. So like those things are happening there but they are not unlocked for search at this stage and time. So keep that in mind that it Just because they are providing hiding, that doesn't mean it's searchable.

It also doesn't mean it's accurate. So.

Right.

Keep in mind the. Even though AI speech to text has gotten a lot better over the years, and it has, it is still not perfect. It still takes a human being. And if you're going to use an AI transcription for your podcast, it's up to you, the podcaster, if you're, especially if you're doing it all yourself, to go through that transcript and make sure it's accurate. And I'm going to give you, you know, I know people listening to me will have varying opinions on, oh, they're accurate enough, it's fine, or no, they're not accurate at all, I don't want anything to do with them. And no matter where you fall in sort of the pendulum swing of that, I'm going to give you an example. Tracy and I have used this example in the past, but it's really the most obvious and good one. We always, Tracy and I have experience in product design and development for retail products. And in retail, you see those barcodes on every product that they're scanning at? The reg that's referred to as a skew, conventionally sku, it's an acronym for stock keeping unit. But any AI speech to text software is going to spell that out. Skew. Like you've skewed something or you have a skewed perspective on something. So there are always words and terms that just are not able to be understood by industry today, today or any kind of specific subject matter terms, you know?

Right. And very often when you say things like you spell something out or you say something.com, it actually spells.com.

I'Ll give you another one. With a recent customer, they have a four point sort of plan called awesome. And of course the transcription software spells that as a W E. So M or whatever it is. I mean, whatever. I don't know, I'm not the best speller in the world. But his awesome is an acronym. O S O M. It's just pronounced awesome. Another example of something that is just never ever going to get properly transcribed.

Right, Right. And so these are the things, the things that matter that if you're going to spend a limited amount of time, like you do not have a lot of time. The things that you want to clean up are things related to your business, to your programs and processes and to any URLs, anything that you need to link through to. And then if you have guests on your show you want to do the best you can to make sure your guest names are spelled right. And like very often the university, if you announce what university they went through, they'll get it wrong. The AI gets it wrong all the time and we'll mess up the name of the university. So we've seen that happen a lot. So out of respect for your guests, make sure you check those things as well. So that's the minimum level you want to do. And you want to do that, that even if you're using YouTube's transcription system, you can check the transcription in the process of it, you can fix it over there, fix it right within the transcript side of things for those items. If you have a limited set of time and you don't have a team doing this for you, that is the minimum you want to do. But you want to fix it because otherwise what you say is, is being misinterpreted by the mind of the person who, even if it's just scanning on the bottom of the captioning, it's not registering for them if they're properly. And so we want to make that connection to how we actually spell something, where they actually go for things. Right. So those are the things to fix.

And this is happening in a lot of places now. I mean, Apple's doing automatic transcriptions of your stuff whether you want them to or not. And so are some of the other listening apps. And it's just always going to have a level of inaccuracy if you're not going to go in there and fix it.

Right now, there is a way for you to upload a transcript into those systems, but what will not happen is they will not be synced unless you've corrected them with the timings in place. It's called an SRT file for video. Unless you've done it with the synchronized timings, you've actually edited it in the editing software to make sure that the timings match up with the audio or the video. It's never going to match. So you uploading that, it's better because then the transcript is all there, but it won't be synced to the audio file or to the video file. And so just understanding that the choice is yours, do you care about the sync or do you care about how it's spelled and how it's. How it's written? Which do you care about more?

Yeah, and there are certainly some editing programs like Descript, that you're actually using the transcript to edit an episode, but that then becomes double duty to not only correct what it says, but you're also. Also editing the software with it too.

Anyway, they're adding the file, the video or audio file.

Sorry, yeah, there's pros and cons with all these things, but.

So I'm going to put out this. I'm going to put out my perspective on this and you can disagree with me. I do not care about that. Like, it's. This is just. I want to put this out as a perspective on this. If someone is watching the caption, if someone is got this, they likely have the sound turned off, so the timing doesn't matter. I would rather have an accurate. I personally would rather have an accurate transcription with everything spelled correctly, and I would rather have that done separately and load up in that file and not care about the timing of it. Because if they're watching the captions or they're reading the transcript, they're not listening to it. So they don't know it's out of sync. And I would rather have that be accurate if they're actually doing that reading part of it. Because I want them to go to the right place, I want them to take the right action. I want them to understand what's really being said. So that's just my viewpoint on it. As a reader, I never watch a video with the sound on. I could say one out of every thousand videos I might watch, will I watch it with the sound on? I never do it. I'm a reader, I am not a viewer. I rarely do it. Like, it'd have to be something with singing in it or something with music in it for me to turn the sound on. Right. Like, that's just the way I am. So I want you to understand that the kind of consumer of that wants to be accurate. But I also anticipate that in the future, YouTube is going to make that searchable. Apple will make that searchable. It's not today, but they will. And when they do, I want it to be correct. So that's my other reasoning for wanting that. So if you've got limited space, time, energy, you don't edit your own video? We don't. I mean, like, you know, a lot of us livestream, like, we live stream this. We're not in control of how that turns out. But if we're going to load up a transcript from it, do the transcript separate. And these are some of the best practices we're going to talk about next. Do these things and then reload it up in there and just try not to care about the syncing.

But again, then some of these lessons, yes, it will help you for the transcript if you're going to use it as an SRT file to upload to YouTube or somewhere else or even to replace the transcript on Apple, which you can do if you really want to. But also the benefit, the real opportunity for all you podcasters is again to cast a much wider net to be found by your more of your ideal listeners who weren't looking for a podcast, who weren't looking on YouTube. And I know YouTube is the number two search engine. I hear this from people all the time. It is, you're right. But it's still a low single digit percentage compared to the people searching on Google itself. And in order to really be found by people searching on things in alignment with what you've talked about, you need a blog post on your website to do that. And that's what I think everybody should be doing with these transcripts. Although there are other obviously other good purposes for them as well. So.

Absolutely. Yeah. No, so the other part that I want to just mention at this time before we go into our best practices, which we're going to do here, is just also to say we see a lot of you do this where you, you do have your transcript and or your show notes and you drop them into your YouTube description and your episode description area. Oh my goodness, please don't do that. It is awful practice because what you're not capturing is that the person who's actually listening to it is not a reader. Right? Like so remember I was talking about if somebody's watching the captions or reading the transcript, right. They know to look for that because they're a reader like I am. But if they're listening to the episode, they want the calls to action to be right up there at the top, a short summary of what they're going to get. Just make sure that what you're putting into those descriptions is valuable. You do want it SEO packed. This is a great way to go. Use AI and go say here's my transcript. Now come up with a great summary that I could put in my episode description. Do it that way. It's much more valuable to keep your calls to action and all those kinds of details, information about your guest, information about how to find you. Put that right up there at the top. Don't waste your time because it's duplicating what is already showing in your Apple app, in your podcast player app. It's duplicating what's on PO, what's on YouTube it's duplicating that. So do not waste the space because it's not useful. It's not helping you with anything.

Well, and obviously I've seen it cause some big problems. We have some people we work with, their podcasts are. Well, it doesn't really matter where you're hosted. A lot of the platforms will allow you to put a full transcript as the description in of your podcast. And what it does is it makes your RSS feed just massively huge, takes it longer for it to load, which is not a good thing for anybody, you or the listener. And not only that, a lot of the podcast listening apps will truncate it after 4000 characters. And so you've just wasted your time putting the whole thing in there because.

Usually the call to action is at the end, right. And so you've gotten it in its cut off. So this is why we don't recommend that. It's. It's replication of stuff that's not useful. It's not actually adding any value. So I just wanted to say that before we move on. So let's talk about some things we've learned over 20,000 episodes. Even though it says 10,000 in our description here in our title, it was catchier. With over 10,000, it still sounded big.

I think from an SEO perspective, it's actually a better choice to say 10,000. But yeah, you're right. I know it's, it's.

And, well, more than that. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so here's the three rules of things that I want you to. Don't put the speakers like Speaker 1, Speaker 2, designation, designation, even name, Tom, Tracy, Colon. Take those out. Do not use them. Sometimes you have a choice and you don't even have to have them in the transcript. It's very rare. But sometimes you can do that. And then don't have timestamps. Now, sometimes you want the timestamps because it helps you edit, it helps you utilize it, but you're gonna strip them out. You do not want them in your final transcript. It is not good blog practice. It's not good for SEO. It's not good for any of those other things that you will do for you to have timestamps and speaker names in there. So those are the first two. The third thing is don't over edit it. That is the biggest lesson we've learned is don't over edit it. Don't fix what you say you can fix and remove.

Ah.

Although a lot of the transcripts, a lot of the AI does that now. So it's not even in there to begin with. But don't. You can remove ums, oz double words. When you repeat yourself, it happens like you emphasize something and you repeat yourself in the transcript. It doesn't read well, but it sounds good when you're saying it on a video or an audio. Right? You're emphasizing it, but it doesn't read well. So you can take out those things. But do not fix your grammar. Do not over fix what you said. If you said the wrong thing like you actually said it backwards, it happens like you said don't do something when you meant do do something. What I recommend doing is what they do in an article is you put in parentheses after S I C psych and you say I really meant don't do this or do this. Right? And just put that correction there. Because if someone is watching the caption or reading it and listening, then you've corrected what was said.

I agree. Look, if you have something that was really, really bad grammatically and it just ends up changing the meaning of what was said, I would fix it. But the plain spoken, you know, language, the imperfect grammar and word order, Google recognizes as original and likes it and rewards it. And they've done that since 2009.

So this is they like they call, we call verbal patterning. That's why we call it verbal SEO blog. Right? Verbal patterning has high value because they know that you weren't written by an AI and they know that you weren't written by automation, a bot or a writer firm. Right. Whose grammar is too formal. And they know that this is American. If you're speaking, you're writing this in the US or you're from the uk, it's British. Like they understand that pattern is matching to that and that means that you are located there and that has value to them too from a Google Google location. So these things really matter. Now, if you're going to put the transcript into your blog on your website, there are a couple other things that we do, okay. And that is that we remove some of that chit chat at the beginning. We don't always go like, hey, welcome to the show, like, because every time, every one of your blogs would start with that if you did that. So we actually put the episode description as a, its own paragraph. We call it a leading paragraph. Right? And that is a article term. You always write a leading paragraph when you write an article. And so we put that above and then we will start the transcript below that so that it doesn't, it has something original and that you don't have duplication and how every single episode starts so that the automation that puts it into the Google search engine doesn't take the first few sentences and then every single episode looks the same. So that's why we do it that way. We also don't really look at that speaker designation. We designate it with bold face and light face. So if you're the host of the show, your question or what you're saying is always bold and what the guest is saying is in lightface. And if it's just a solo, it's all in light face. It's not all, it's not bold. So we just do that to help the visual representation. So if you're listening to it, you're seeing it, it's making sense to the listener. So that's why we do it that way. And Google doesn't understand the difference between bold face and lightface. It doesn't get why you did it. They don't care.

It doesn't factor into SEO, neither does italics or even colors of different portions of text. So there's many ways to designate between different speakers, especially if you have a lot of speakers. Although when Tracy and I, especially in the days of wtff, were, you know, co host and both interviewing a guest, we would actually adjust our transcript so that the two of us, my part of speech and Tracy's, were transcribed as one voice instead of two people, which we did change some things, not really what was said, but the context around what was said.

Yeah, we might say we instead of I or some other things like that. We might adjust to the sort of way of doing it.

But both of us were in bold type in that case, and only the guest was in normal type, so it.

Didn'T matter which one of us. Yeah. And you'll see that if you go to any one of these episodes that feed your brand on. For feed your brand, you go to podcasters united.org you'll be able to go to any feed your brand episode. And you can look at the way we do the blog there. Go check it out.

When it's just you and me like an episode like this, I think we do distinguish between you and me, but in wtff, if you go back and look at some of those on 3dstartpoint.com I think you'll see you and me. Well, you don't have to one voice a lot.

The binge factor is there with interviews and we have coaching crashers on feed your brand. So when we have coaching crashers it's usually Tom and I and a guest. So we have a mix of everything that you can just check out right on Podcasters United. So all of those are there for you to look at, but that's the model of how we do it. I'm not going to go into all our blogging tips, like how we create heading one and use heading two and do all of that. That's a whole nother episode here, and I don't want to dive into that. But the podcast transcription itself is the basis for everything that we do. So we do cut out a little bit of that chit chat at the begin that thank you at the end. Like, sometimes we leave it in because clients like it and sometimes we don't. But for the most part we don't leave it in because it's unnecessary and it's. Your brain is disregarding it. If you're listening and reading. They want to get to the meat of everything. But here I know there's going to be people, Tom, who disagree with us about the timestamps. So I would love for you to like, go into why these timestamps besides Google not liking them in the blog side of things, but why are these timestamps not valuable to you as a podcaster there?

I'm speaking from a perspective here of a podcaster that wants listeners to listen to my entire episode from minute one till the very end. Okay. And you know, I actually let me give you an example, because I had a customer recently asked me, well, can we have a player the website that you can have all these timestamped highlights, important points, when you click it, it'll jump them right to that point and listen, it's like, well, yeah, okay, there are ways to do that, but I very much recommend you don't. Now having some highlights pointing out at the top of your blog post or within your description episode, here are the important things we discussed. Sure, yeah, by all means, let's put that there. Let's have some effectively, like a. Almost a table of contents or won't want to miss this type of thing.

But we're not giving them a roadmap to skip your episode and jump to that timestamp.

That just really irks me when I see that on some podcasters sites because really most people are doing it just because they've seen other people do it and they think, well, they're doing it. Oh, I guess I should do that. That must be what everybody's supposed to.

Do, you know, it's such a bad business practice, though. Because we're not getting them to listen to our show, which is our purpose.

I agree. It's kind of like Tracy, you remember? And now I'm gonna have to go find this video and put it in the blog post. But there's this great video of member from what's the Fremont street in Las Vegas where, you know, there's all sorts of things going on, and these people doing a social experiment just put this sign that says line forms here. And then it's in the middle of this. It's a. It's a pedestrian street, so there's no traffic. Okay. But it's in the middle of the street, and there's all different theaters and stores and restaurants and all sorts of things around. Says line forms here. And people just came up and started standing there and forming a line. And then other people would come behind them and ask the person in front of them, what are we in line for? I don't know, but it must be good. And I don't want to miss it, you know? And so everybody just kept saying, I don't know what it is, but I want to see. I want. I don't. I want to miss it. So you had all these people just falling in line, and it was for quite a long time, formed a very long line just because everybody saw other people doing it and thought it must be something they should do, too, and they don't want to miss it. All right, so I'm going to find that video because it's great, and I'll put it in the blog post.

So I want to interject here to say this is also the reason Tom and I are telling you to stop doing show notes in PDF. I do not want to ever see anyone who's listened to our show ever do that again. First off, people are afraid to download PDFs, so I guarantee you, if you ever tracked any of them, very few have ever gotten downloaded. And most of them probably got downloaded because somebody accidentally clicked it, not because they purposefully clicked it. So stop doing it and instead make a blog post.

And so I think very early on in podcasting, the pioneers of podcasting, when they started to create a show notes, you know, post, and it just provides a summary of information about the episode on your website and maybe some links to the connect with the guest on social or their website or whatever, those are good things to provide people. But the timestamps, whoever thought that was a good idea, I think it was more technical to put it there.

It was coming out of the editing software.

Yeah. More than experiential for the user experience. But you're inviting people to jump ahead and skip to one thing and listen to it completely out of context and not listening to your entire story. The people want to listen to podcasts more than anything to hear the story. So do you want them to hear the punchline without the setup? No, I mean, I don't. I don't get it. Now, look, maybe there may be some exceptions, and I'm sure some people listening to this are like, yelling at me into their device and are saying, no, no, no. You know, look, podcasts, like the daily or up first or something, right? There's all sorts of podcasts that are like small digest, 5 to 10 minute long episodes and having the rundown of what those things are. Maybe there's one thing in the news you wanted to hear and you want to jump to it, and you don't want to hear the other garbage in the news. I could see an exception for that because it's not the same type of a podcast. Okay, so there's probably some exceptions out there, but for the vast majority of us independent podcasters, it's not in our best interest. And I would prefer to require the listener hear my entire message from start to finish, everything as it was intended to be, in context, and that's it. So I just. I just think you're hurting yourself by not doing that. All right, rant over.

Okay, so the last two things I want to touch on is that, look, if you're a writer, listen up. Get over the transcript.

Oh, my goodness.

Just get over the inaccuracy of it. Get over the grammatical problems, get over the punctuation. Get over it. Because I'm going to tell you that from our experience doing over 20,000 blogs, our blogs will beat out your article every single day of the week.

100% true. 100% true, Tracy.

And so you overdoing this and overthinking this and worrying about this is not worth the effort.

I had to get over it. Like, it took me years to get over it.

And you are a real writer. I mean, Tracy can write the hard way, as good as anybody I've ever met. I mean, you are a great writer. No, it's true. You're a real writer. I am not. And I will never be. I will always speak my way to writing something first.

Because there's a place for both. That's a whole different podcast episode that we've done before, right? There's a place for both into having an article is a separated Thing. But having a blog transcript and utilizing transcript is for a different purpose. It is not an article, so get over it. So I recommend you adopt the movie theater actor, the actor model. Don't watch your own stuff, don't read your own transcripts. Let some assistant fix it, do it and don't overthink it. And then stop getting really upset when there's an error in it. It's gonna happen. Just fix it and move on. Like, you gotta let it go.

Couldn't agree with you more, Tracy. You know, I explained to every potatoes customer for production where we do this, especially the ones that I know are real writers and they have a book they wrote the conventional way, not the modern. Speak your way to your book with one of these programs. And I'm not saying those books are bad, but they're just different. Okay, Inevitably, I'll have a couple, three, four customers every year over the course of the year that each one of them says this. I don't understand the blog. I can't have this on my website. I don't write like that. It's like, okay, I understand you don't write like that, but you did speak like that and it's your choice right now. Would you rather have this podcast episode blog be written differently from what people are actually going to listen to? Because you're not going to go back and rerecord what you recorded just to sound like what you'd like it to read like. If you wrote it the conventional way, you can be found by more of your ideal listeners using the kind of blog we create. Or you can change it and sanitize that blog and have crickets worth of traffic coming to your website to read it compared to what you would have the other way. To me, this is all about discoverability. Now, at the end of the day, the customer can have it their way, and that's fine.

But we have seen it done. We have seen it where someone will spend hours updating and fixing the transcript and rewriting it and changing what is said. And it will harm the traffic. There's no question about it. It will harm the traffic of it. So do not do it. It's a waste of time and energy. Just get over it. Don't look at that.

Don't write another article, a piece of your writing. You've got to think of this as a net. You can go fishing in the ocean with a net the size of a tennis racket or a net the size of a football field. Which one do you want? If you want to Catch more fish. I mean, that's, you know, that's its purpose. Crude analogy, but that's. That's really the intent and the purpose. I want you to be heard by more people. That's the lens through which we look at everything and everything that we've optimized and what we do for ourselves, what we're recommending for you.

And then the last thing I want to touch on before we go is that we have transcripts on Pahdatais that. And I don't want to forget about that because one of our most recommended way to do this is if you already have your audio file completed, it's edited, it's all ready to go, do the transcript then. It's not always practical. We don't do this for our done for you production services. We do it at a raw transcript level because we want to be done on time. But if you are publishing your own audio into and you want the best transcript possible, utilizing your final audio is the best way to go. Right. It's simpler, it's easier. So we have a automated transcript that comes with our service. So you can go in there, publish your audio and get your transcript at the same time so that you can clean it up pretty quickly. You can remove the timestamps, you can remove the speaker designations, and you can utilize that in your. You can absolutely utilize that in Apple or in YouTube or in all the other places that you might want to do it and load it up into your blog so you can do it at the time you schedule your episode, give you enough time to do any blogs or other things that you want to do. And it's super simple to do. And you are utilizing our base AI, which is a whole lot better than a lot of people say I, because we've used it, we've refined it, and we've gotten it a lot farther along. Now, would I like it to have, like, no timestamps, no speaker designations? No. All of those things? Yes.

But truth be told, Tracy, we can code our system to remove all those things and make them bold and not bold. But here's the reality of it, too. Sometimes those speaker designations, when it says Speaker 1, it's actually Speaker 2. And that takes a person to fix. And if we did that and sanitized it and made it our way for everybody, there's going to be somebody that isn't going to want it that way.

So I think eventually we're going to have a switch that we flip where you can have it our way or you can have it the original way. Like we're going to do that in the future, but right now it's just available and it comes with your hosting. So, like it's so easy to make sure that you're getting the best transcript possible at this time. And we're continuing to refine that because we have a partnership with Google that we're working on. So we've had a grant with Google for the last year and so we're really working towards making this the best that it can possibly be.

Well, I think we've covered this topic very well.

What do you think a really geeky topic about transcript? Like micro topics we're getting into here over on the podcasting side. But these things are supporting your podcast and they're things that you need to think about and we want to make sure that we're covering them for you because sometimes these things actually are a power engine in making sure that your podcast is found. And this transcript is actually one of them, especially when you utilize it on your website in a blog. So not too geeky after all.

Well, just something important that every podcaster needs to consider. You know, if you're wondering, why am I not being heard by more people? You know what, there are probably lots of reasons why, but here's one path to being heard by more people that you might consider.

Okay, let's leave it at that. And as always, remember we told you to go to podcasters united.org where you'll be able to find the podcast for this episode. You can check out how our blog looks. But more importantly, I'm going to do you a big favor here. In this particular episode, I'm going to give you our raw transcript and I'm going to give you ability to link through to our final edited transcript. And then you'll be able to see the blog post. So you'll see the three pieces that we put together that we utilize with our dynam for your production team so you can get a look at this particular episode. You'll have the audio, you'll have the video, you'll have all of those pieces there. And you'll be able to see the broken out parts that we normally don't share with everyone. We will share that for this episode and you'll be able to find that in the blog post for this episode@podcasters united.org.

All right, that sounds great. Great bonus. So go check that out. We'll see you next time. This has been Tom and Tracy Hazard on Feed your Brand.

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