The Origin Story of Apple Podcasts’ Transcripts

Ari Saperstein, writing for The Guardian, interviewed Ben Cave, Apple’s global head of podcasts and Sarah Herrlinger, who manages accessibility policy for the company, about Apple Podcasts transcripts. The feature, which was introduced in March, automatically generates transcripts of podcast episodes in Apple’s catalog and has been a big accessibility win for podcast fans.

The origins of Apple’s transcription efforts began modestly:

Apple’s journey to podcast transcripts started with the expansion of a different feature: indexing. It’s a common origin story at a number of tech companies like Amazon and Yahoo – what begins as a search tool evolves into a full transcription initiative. Apple first deployed software that could identify specific words in a podcast back in 2018.

“What we did then is we offered a single line of the transcript to give users context on a result when they’re searching for something in particular,” Cave recalls. “There’s a few different things that we did in the intervening seven years, which all came together into this [transcript] feature.”

Drawing from technologies and designs used by Apple Music and Books, the feature has been lauded by the accessibility community:

“I was knocked out on how accurate it was,” says Larry Goldberg, a media and technology accessibility pioneer who created the first closed captioning system for movie theaters. The fidelity of auto-transcription is something that’s long been lacking, he adds. “It’s improved, it has gotten better … but there are times when it is so wrong.”

My experience with Podcasts’ transcripts tracks with the people interviewed for Saperstein’s story. Automatically generated transcription is hard. I’ve tried various services in the past, and I’ve never been happy enough with any of them to publish their output on MacStories. Apple’s solution isn’t perfect, but it’s easily the best I’ve seen, tipping into what I consider publishable territory. The feature makes it easy to search, select text, and generate time-stamped URLs for quoting snippets of an episode, which makes the app an excellent tool for researching and writing about podcasts, too.