DIY / How-To Podcast Transcription

How do you transcript podcasts if you don’t want to pay someone else to? Well, you have three options:

1. Listen to your podcast and transcribe it yourself.
2. Purchase some software to help you do it.
3. There is no number three. :)

When thinking about option 1 and typing it all out yourself… consider this:

• the average person talks at 140 words per minute
• there are 4.5 letter per word on average in the English language
• 140 * 4.5 = 630 characters or key strokes
• add spaces between words (140) and punctuation (30) and you get
• 800 characters spoken per minute

Further think about this:

• the average person can type 60 words per minute
• 60 * 4.5 = 270 chars or key strokes
• spaces and punctuation added =
• 340 characters typed per minute

I like running numbers on things:

• 340 characters typed into 800 characters spoken =
• approximately 2 1/2 minutes of typing for every minute spoken

I’ll spare you the rest of what I was thinking, but you obviously can’t type as fast as you talk. So, you’ll have to stop and start the podcast and type what you hear as you go. If your podcast is 5 minutes long, that’s approximately 15 minutes of typing time. A 20 minute podcast would take the average person 1 hour of strait typing to transcribe. An hour podcast would take 3 hours of typing to transcribe.

Want to hear about option 2?

Sorry this is going to be so simple, but… go buy yourself a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. There are several versions of it, but you’ll need the Preferred version for $200. It, unlike the Standard version, gives you an option of dictation with ‘after the fact’ text from audio conversion. It will ‘listen’ to a wav file and type it out for you in a text document that can be saved in word or as a pdf. I’m searching for other options and mac friendly pieces of software that are as feature rich as Dragon, but from the one’s that I’ve seen, I haven’t found one as good yet that I’d recommend.

It’s your choice to post your transcript in your show notes, on a website, etc. I suggest creating a separate RSS feed of the transcripts so those that want to consume your podcast in that format can do so.

As recommended in a past post, CastingWords does a great job of transcribing, and is $0.42 / minute. At that rate, it would take you 476 minutes to use up the $200 that you would pay for Dragon. So, if you like to do it yourself, great, but the overhead may just not be worth it. $200 at CastingWords = Ninety-five 5 minute podcasts = Twenty-three 20 minute podcasts = Seven 60 minute podcasts… you decide?

I leave you with this: the world record for spoken words per minute is 603! 5 minutes of that and you’d be typing for an hour and 1/2… yikes!

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