Looking to learn how to turn your audio into text? In this blog post i’ll share with you my insights on how to turn your podcast episodes into text and video/ audio snippets so you can use them to market your podcast, grow your audience and get more listeners to your podcast. And for free? Read on!

I recently started a new podcsat as part of my work, built a new website and created a brand for it, so it doesn’t seem too similar to our day to day and people think we are trying to sell something, it was made entirely to support the industry we operate in and share the knowledge top executives have and want to share.

Part of my plan to grow the audience and listeners was making sure to turn every episode into text and then creating blog posts from the transcription, both for those who want to read and for SEO purposes, but that turned to be kind of a problem with 2 episodes, 40 minutes long each. I started searching for a free tool (Did I mention we ran this project on a low budget?) to take my audio and turn it into text but that turned into a mission impossible as every tool had either a very short time limit or other freemium business models that required payment.

How to turn your audio into text?

It took me a few hours and a few calls to colleagues until I finally got a word from a friend at Audioburst, a startup with a goal to build the world’s largest library for audio content. Here’s how they do it, in their own words:

By organizing live and prerecorded audio content to make it more easily accessible and discoverable, we aim to power the next generation of listening experiences across web, mobile, IoT and in-car entertainment systems.

Once you connect your RSS link to the Audioburst Creators dashboard (supporting English and Japanese for now), which is super simple (read on to learn how), the platform takes your audio to create what they call “bursts” (and they have nearly 2M of those from over 2K podcasts to date). Once the bursts are created, the platform turns them into audio/video snippets which you can easily share in a single click and transcribe the audio to text and download to your pc. And all that for free!

Here is the video snippet (or what podcasters call, an “Audiogram”) I created using Audioburst video editor, it’s super easy and very useful as it allows you to edit the exact part of the audio and also to upload a new background image to go along with the video.

What would the spirit industry need to do in the day after #coronavirus is over from our new podcast talk with Ilan Avitsur, Area Manager at @roust cc: @drinkripples #spiritindustry #drinkexperience #podcast pic.twitter.com/IYDvNQsHLI

— Geva Telem (@Geva_T) April 11, 2020

How to connect your podcast to Audioburst?

Once you created your profile and logged into Audioburst Creators dashboard, click on add a podcast at the top left corner. You’ll be asked to add your podcast’s RSS link so the platform would sync your published episodes (it doesn’t work on drafts) and start creating usable content.

Here’s how it looks

Once you synced your podcast into the platform, you’ll be notified when the platform has finished “reading” (or listening) to your episodes and they are available in the dashboard for you to start promoting them or download the transcription.

The “Bursts” are ready to go

When the “bursts” are ready (Bursts are audio snippets the platform created for you), you can start editing them or quickly share them on social. The Audioburst dashboard will soon let you see how many people listened to your bursts from the Audio Burst platform and some basic analytics to understand better which were more popular than others.

The worth mentioning that the quality of transcription relies heavily on the sound quality, accent and the language used in the audio. Some complex words or slang language might get lost in translation. From my 2 transcription experience I can say it is a lot easier than sitting down to type a 40 minute conversation or paying someone to do so, but you still need to review the text and make the required adjustments, as it’s not 100% accurate (I would say it’s 85%).

I found this tool super helpful and from my talks with my Audioburst friend (Hey Raz), some cool features are coming up soon so make sure to start using it before they put pricing on those very useful features- transcribing your audio into text and creating audio and video snippets to share on social.

Comment below and let me know if you also found this useful.