Friday, March 20, 2026

Overcast Transcripts

Macro Arment (Mastodon):

What’s in this beta:

  • Transcripts of most podcasts (swipe on the episode art during playback, it’s a new page past the info screen)

  • Live-scrolling of transcripts during playback

  • Tap to seek on any line of text

  • Music detection

All of this should work even with dynamic ad insertion… and even with private/membership podcasts!

And if you play an episode that isn’t transcribed yet, you can transcribe it right on your iPhone (if you’re running iOS 26+).

This is really impressive, and I think it will be transformative for podcast listening and triage. There’s a long discussion with more technical details in the latest Accidental Tech Podcast.

Christian Bender:

The way you can follow along as the audio plays, or jump to a place in the episode by tapping a paragraph in the transcript, is just so convenient. It made me seriously consider using Apple Podcasts. And of course, I immediately tested the Overcast implementation.

[…]

It’s the kind of feature that fits how I use podcasts. Like chapters, it supports choice. It lets you cut through the noise and get straight to the topics that interest you.

Previously:

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