Overcast Transcripts
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.
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:
Update (2026-04-10): Marco Arment (Mastodon):
The first update with transcripts is now in the App Store!
See also: Steven Aquino.
2 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Marco's journey on how he ended up with 48 Mac minis is quite amusing.
Also: I know that people have been praising how much faster Apple's transcription models are, but not once have I seen any comparison of accuracy or overall transcription quality (e.g. omitting filler words, properly inserting punctuation). Guess I'll finally see it once this feature leaves beta.
Yeah after listening to Marco describe his data center Mac minis on ATPodcast I was reminded when Apple came out with this feature, I was surprised to learn the transcription is not done locally. Apple probably supports more past versions of iOS than Marco does or wants to. But since it is possible on an iPhone from about the past 2 generations at least, it seems that would be a much better way to go!
