Free Podcast Transcription for Show Notes

Every podcast episode should ship with a text version. Show notes help listeners skim before they commit, give search engines and AI assistants something to index, and make your back catalogue accessible to people who can't or don't want to listen. The problem is that writing them by hand from a 40-minute recording is its own small job.

This guide walks through turning an episode into usable show notes with ScribeToAny — for free, without installing anything.

Why a text transcript is worth the five minutes

Discovery. Audio is invisible to search. A transcript on your episode page is the only part of the episode Google, Bing and AI answer engines can actually read and quote.
Accessibility. A transcript makes the episode usable for deaf and hard-of-hearing listeners, and for anyone in a quiet office or a loud commute.
Repurposing. Once you have the text, pulling three quote-cards, a newsletter blurb and a set of timestamped chapters takes minutes instead of a relisten.

Step by step

Export the episode audio. An mp3, m4a or wav straight from your recording tool or host is fine. You can also paste a public link instead of uploading a file.
Upload it to ScribeToAny. The language is detected automatically — transcription covers roughly 98 languages.
Turn on speaker labels if the episode has more than one voice. Every segment gets tagged, so an interview reads as a conversation rather than a wall of text.
Review in the browser. Clicking any segment replays that moment of the audio, so fixing a misheard name or term is quick.
Export in the format you need. Plain TXT for the episode page, SRT or VTT if your host supports captions, or PDF/DOCX for a downloadable transcript. TSV, CSV and JSON are there too if you want to script something.

Getting timestamps and chapters

The SRT and VTT exports are timestamped line by line, which is exactly what you need for chapter markers. If you publish captions on YouTube or a video version of the show, the same VTT file drops straight in. Need to convert between subtitle formats afterwards? The free browser tools handle SRT, VTT, ASS, SSA, SMI and TTML entirely on your machine — nothing is uploaded — and there's an SRT editor for retiming cues.

What the free plan covers

The free plan allows 2 transcriptions a day and 100 minutes a month, with a 30-minute cap per file and no credit card. For a weekly show that releases one episode, splitting a long episode into two halves keeps you inside the free tier. If you run a daily show or a long-form interview podcast, the paid plans lift the per-file and monthly limits.

A note on multilingual shows

If your audience is international, a transcript is also the cheapest path to a translated version of the episode. On the Max plan, a finished transcript can be translated into any of 56 languages segment by segment — the subtitle cue timings stay identical to the original, so a translated SRT still lines up with the audio.

Show notes are the one piece of podcast work that pays off in three directions at once — discovery, accessibility and repurposing. Start with the podcast transcription tool and you'll have the text before your coffee's cold.