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

A developer built Spotify Podcast Transcript, an Apify actor that takes a Spotify or Apple Podcasts link, RSS feed, or direct audio URL, locates the show's public RSS feed, matches the episode, and transcribes the audio with Whisper large-v3. The tool returns plain text, timestamped segments, and optional SRT files, and the developer reports a 50-minute episode took about 40 seconds and cost $0.15 at $0.003 per audio minute. The writeup also documents two manual alternatives: copying the in-app transcript where available, or pulling the audio enclosure from the public RSS feed and running OpenAI's open-source Whisper locally.

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 https://apify.com/spokentext/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: 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. | You want to... | Use | |---|---| | Read along once | The Spotify app | | Transcribe an episode now and then, for free | RSS feed + Whisper | | Transcribe many episodes or automate it | The tool, through its API | 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.