Transcripts Are Apple Podcasts’s Best New Feature in Years
6th March 2024
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.