Ari Saperstein writing for The Guardian: Accessible and ‘A Pleasure to Read’: How Apple’s Podcast Transcriptions Came to Be

Apple’s podcast app will transcribe every new uploaded episode. “We wanted to do it for all the shows, so it’s not just for like a narrow slice of the catalogue,” says Cave. “It wouldn’t be appropriate for us to put an arbitrary limit on the amount of shows who get it … We think that’s important from an accessibility standpoint because we want to give people the expectation that transcripts are available for everything that they want to interact with.”

The transcriptions in Apple Podcasts are truly a fantastic feature and it might be the main feature that draws me to using Apple’s app over Overcast (Overcast is still my go-to, but it’s close!).

My one big hope for this is that it can one day get the ability to transcribe your custom feeds. As it stands today, transcripts will not appear for shows you manually enter their feed URL into the app. I’m guessing this is because the transcript processing is happening on Apple’s servers, and feeds you add yourself never touch Apple’s servers, so Apple doesn’t know about them. If they could move the transcription on-device like they do for Voice Memos in iOS 18, that would be a great feature for people like me who have a few Patreon feeds that don’t get the benefit of this awesome feature today.