If you are a podcaster, journalist or video content creator, interviews are a big part of what you do. Keeping your focus on the person you are interviewing is key. Rather than taking notes, we record the interview. In this post we'll talk about how to transcribe an interview, and how that transcription can benefit you.
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Why Transcribe an Interview?
Why you would transcribe an interview really depends on what you do. When you transcribe an interview you get a word for word account of what was said.
Searchable Document
When you convert audio to text, you now have a searchable document.
Now you can search the interview, making key parts easier to find, rather than listening back to the whole recording. With a VTT file you can even see the timestamp, so you can go back and listen to key sections of the interview.
Show Notes
When podcasting, one of the most important parts is creating show notes for your podcasts. This includes a brief description of the podcast. It highlights key points in the interviews that would be of interest for your listeners. Using time stamps, you can help listeners find the keep points in your podcast.
The beautiful thing when you have a transcription of your podcast, creating your show notes becomes so much easier. You'll know exactly where the key points are because you'll have the whole interview time stamped in a VTT file if you want.
Reach a Larger Audience
People that are deaf or hard of hearing will never benefit from your content, unless you transcribe it. When you do MP3 to text transcription, now they can read the whole interview.
Adding a full transcription of an interview to your show notes brings that untapped market to you and makes your content more accessible for the Deaf or hard of hearing. That's a win-win.
SEO Benefits
Google doesn't listen to audio and can't understand what it is about. Google can read text. By including a transcript in your podcast show notes of an interview, or adding subtitles to a video interview, Google can know what your content is about.
You can SEO optimize your scripts and questions in your interviews. When you transcribe it, search engines can now read and help put it in front of the right audience.
Who Should Transcribe an Interview?
Podcasters
As a podcaster you can benefit immensely from transcribing interviews. The transcription will help you with creating show notes, reach a larger audience and improve SEO for the podcast.
You are probably already doing SEO research for your description and headline. Now you can do it in advance for the podcast itself, and gain the SEO benefits by adding keywords into the content.
Have you ever seen Google's "People also ask"? Of course you have. It's halfway down the page and is based on people's questions that they have typed into Google. If you are interviewing someone on a specific topic, you can ask some of these very questions in your interview.
Google's People Also Ask
So start sprinkling in some keywords right into your podcasts. Now that Google understands what your podcast is about, it can put it in front of the right people.
YouTube
Some podcasters will also have an audio form of their podcast on YouTube. This is a fantastic way to promote your podcast on another platform. If you already have the SRT file from an interview transcript of your podcast, you can now easily upload the file to add captions to YouTube. All with the click of a button. Talk about double dipping!
Journalists
As a journalist, being able to find important quotes of an interview can be key. When you transcribe an interview, you now have a searchable document. Finding parts of the interview you want to refer back to is now so much easier.
With timestamps, you can look for your questions and quickly find the responses that follow and go listen back if you want.
You also have a full transcription that you can keep on file should you ever need to refer back. You can email the transcription to anyone else if they need to refer to your interview.
Video
Most countries require broadcasters to caption 100% of their programs for the Deaf or hard of hearing community. Creating subtitles for videos can be done easily through an online transcription company like Crowdscriber.
Video Content Creators
Don't worry, we didn't forget about you. If you have videos of your interviews, the benefits for you are very similar to podcasting. You can gain the SEO benefits from adding subtitles to videos.
Essentially, you can leverage existing content to grow your audience. By adding subtitles to your videos you are now opening up your content to a larger audience, and letting Google and YouTube know what your content is about.
If you are on YouTube, then this online transcription software makes it super easy to add subtitles to your YouTube videos.
I'm going to start transcribing my podcasts. Join me in making the world more accessible to everyone. #hardofhearing #deaf
How to Transcribe Interviews
Transcribing an interview can be tedious, especially if you were to do it the old-fashioned way, by listening and typing it all into a word document of sorts.
Luckily things have come a long way, and now there are online transcription companies like Crowdscriber.
Crowdscriber is one of the best transcription software resources because it gives you two options to transcribe an interview.
Free Transcription Software
Crowdscriber provides a free platform for creating transcripts. It's easy to use, with some of the best editing tools that make transcribing easier and faster than other online transcription services.
Oh, and yeah, did I mention it's free? Here's how it works.
Here are the simple steps to create your MP3 transcription.
Transcribe Mp3 to Text Yourself for Free
Create an account here.
Add an MP3 of your interview. Go to Imported Content. You can upload the MP3 or add a URL of where the MP3 is located.
Choose whether you want to start from scratch or have us use A.I. generated auto-captions. This will take a bit to process, we'll let you know when it's done.
Generate a Link and assign yourself a chunk. Each MP3 gets broken into 2 minute chunks. You just transcribe one chunk at a time, making the task of transcribing less daunting.
Did you know you can also have others help you transcribe?
Start transcribing! Complete all the chunks. See how transcribing with Crowdscriber works here.
Review and Download your interview transcription. You can download your transcription in a SRT, VTT, or TEXT file.
If your interview is on YouTube you can upload subtitles directly to YouTube
It's that easy!
Starting gaining the benefits of transcribing your interviews
It's free to use. No catch. No fine print.
Transcription Tip !
Imagine if other people could help you transcribe. That would make things so much easier, wouldn't it?
Well with Crowdscriber you can!
When you generate a link it comes with its own shareable link. Share that link in an email, blast it on social media, send it to anyone who could help you transcribe. They don't even need to create an account.
