How to get a transcript of any Spotify podcast episode (3 ways, with and without code)

I wanted the text of a few podcast episodes so I could search them and feed them to an LLM. Spotify shows a transcript in its app for some shows, but there is no export button, and many shows have no transcript at all.

Here are the three ways I found to get one, with the trade-offs of each.

Open the episode, scroll down, and if the show has transcripts enabled you will see a Transcript section.

Almost every podcast on Spotify is also published through a public RSS feed, and the feed links to the actual audio file. So you can download the audio and transcribe it on your own machine.

Find the feed. Apple runs a free lookup API:

curl "https://itunes.apple.com/search?media=podcast&term=lex+fridman+podcast"

The feedUrl field in the response is the RSS feed. Open it, find the episode you want, and copy the URL in its <enclosure> tag. That is the audio file.

Transcribe it with OpenAI's open-source Whisper:

pip install -U openai-whisper
curl -L -o episode.mp3 "PASTE_THE_ENCLOSURE_URL"
whisper episode.mp3 --model small --output_format txt

Shows that are exclusive to Spotify have no public feed, so this route does not work for them.

I got tired of step 2, so I built a small tool that does the same thing automatically: Spotify Podcast Transcript on Apify.

You paste the link you get from Spotify's Share → Copy link, and it finds the show's public feed, matches the episode, and transcribes the audio with Whisper large-v3. It also accepts Apple Podcasts links, RSS feeds and direct audio URLs.

From Python:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")

run = client.actor("spokentext/spotify-podcast-transcript").call(run_input={
    "urls": ["https://open.spotify.com/episode/4IpeKxxTTa6vw4lRbqH0lg"],
})

for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item["episodeTitle"])
    print(item["text"][:500])

Each result has the plain text, timestamped segments, and optionally an SRT subtitle file. Paste a show link instead of an episode link and it takes the most recent episodes.

Some numbers from my own runs: a 50-minute episode took about 40 seconds and cost $0.15 (it is priced at $0.003 per audio minute). Apify's free plan includes $5 of credit a month, which covers roughly 27 hours of audio.

One reminder: a transcript is a copy of someone else's work. Using it for your own notes, search or analysis is one thing; republishing it needs the publisher's permission.

Disclosure: I built the tool described in section 3. This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked by me.