This lack of transcripts really surprises and frustrates me. Wasnt Berkeley forced to take down its videos unless they added captioning? I guess it’s because they’re taxpayer funded right? But Twitter was also getting flack for introducing video without the accessibility of captions, but for a company that can afford $100 million to buy one podcast, why can’t they be compelled to provide transcripts?

Hey @AlbertCory,

How would having a transcript save you time? Wouldn't it take more or less the same amount of time (+/- 25%) to read through the transcript? Would you rather CTRL+F for a few terms? Or just quickly glance through it?

Asking, because I'm interested in the podcast space overall.

Thanks.

As the sibling says: I can skim over the boring, boilerplate stuff ("thanks for having me") much faster in a transcript.

Since I can see the whole thing, it's much easier to skip down to the more interesting stuff, or realize that there isn't any.

A typical podcast is 150 to 200 words per minute, while many on hacker news read at north of 600 words per minute.

I'm not the original poster, but I have bad hearing and exclusively read transcripts over listening to podcasts - can't tell you how many times I've been grateful when podcasters provide even a partial list of transcripts for episodes. Speed-reading is also a lot faster overall versus simple listening.

You would be surprised, but reading a transcript is much faster than listening, even on speedup (1.25x, 1.5x, )

You can also quickly scan ahead, or reread a sentence. Navigating audio is harder.