Transcripts Are Apple Podcasts’s Best New Feature in Years

Apple Podcasts is hardly the best podcast app for your iPhone, but it is the one that comes preinstalled. For many of us, that means it’s the only podcast app we’ll ever bother with, which means the more improvements Apple makes to Podcasts, the better. Fortunately, the company’s latest change, arriving with iOS 17.4, is actually pretty great.

With the new iOS update, Apple has added a transcripts feature to Podcasts. The results are honestly impressive: Not only do transcripts allow you to read along with any given podcast episode, they seem automatically available on all new podcasts on the app—so long as the podcast is in English, French, Spanish, or German. That means, going forward, Apple will add transcripts to episodes shortly after they drop. For older episodes, the company says transcripts will be added “over time.” For what it’s worth, The Daily has transcripts on its episodes all the way back through May 4, 2023, as of this writing.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen transcripts on all of the podcasts I’ve checked for the feature, from massively popular shows like The Daily, to more niche podcasts like Segments. From what I can tell, the transcripts themselves are accurate. The only issues arise when multiple people are talking at once: The transcript seems to lock onto one voice, and one voice only, which means you may miss out on some context if you’re relying on the transcript alone.

How to access transcript in Apple Podcasts

Credit: Jake Peterson

Once you update your iPhone to iOS 17.4 (available on iPhone XS and newer), you’ll be greeted by a splash screen advertising the launch of transcripts the first time you open Podcasts. From here, just choose a podcast and play it. In the podcast player, hit the transcript button in the bottom left corner and the transcript will fill the screen.

Transcripts work in a remarkably similar way as Apple Music’s live lyrics feature. (The buttons are even the same.) Apple Podcasts will highlight the words in the transcript as the speaker says them, which makes it super easy to follow along. The transcript itself is broken into smaller paragraphs, unless the section spoken is only a sentence or a word. You can tap any of these moments in the transcript to jump to that point in the episode.

Use transcripts to search for any word or phrase in a podcast episode

You can also search any word or phrase in the transcript, just as you would a normal text file. As you scroll through a transcript, hit Search, then type what you’d like to find.

If you want to share part of the transcript to another app, you can long press on any section, then choose Select Text. This opens up the full transcript in a different part of Podcasts, where you can copy the selected text, or any other part of the transcript. (You can also access this page by tapping the three dots in the top right of the player window and choosing View Transcript. You’ll find the search function here as well.)