Did you know that you can get FREE transcriptions of any podcast in English, and that it’s fast and easy to do? That’s right, ANY PODCAST! And did I say FREE? If you are serious about your English learning, you will love Otter.ai — a FREE online service that transcribes audio files. This means podcasts, audio taken from videos, anything at all where the language is fairly clear. All you do is upload the file to otter.ai, and then let the A.I do the rest. It’s unbelievably awesome. You can watch my little YouTube demo video demo here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gw4jviWdno

You can find Otter.ai here:

https://otter.ai

Note: This is not a sales pitch, I don’t have any involvement with Otter.ai other than being a very satisfied customer (I use their paid plan because I need the extra features. You won’t need extra features unless you want to transcribe more than 10 hours of audio per month, or if you need to transcribe files that are longer than 40 minutes each.)

The transcript of this audio podcast is below.

If you get value from my podcasts, please leave a rating or review. It really helps me a lot!

Cheers,

Lori

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, English learners, Lori here, your teacher from betteratenglish.com. Today, I don’t have a conversation for you, I’m actually working on the next conversational episode. And that should be up in the next couple of days. But as I was working on it, I realized that the online service, the tool that I use to transcribe the conversations would be super, super useful for your English learning. So I just wanted to share that with you today, and let you know about it so you can try it yourself.

First of all, let’s get this out of the way. It’s completely free. And I don’t make any money for recommending it to you. No one is asking me to tell you this. It’s simply something that I use myself and that I think, is really awesome. And I think it would almost be a crime for me to not let you know about it.

“Okay, okay, Lori. All right, fine, get on with it, let us know what it is.”

Okay, the tool is called Otter.ai. That’s O T T E R dot A I. And what it is, is an online service where you can upload audio files, and it, the artificial intelligence will create a transcript of the audio.

But that’s not even the best part. For me, I think the most useful thing, the thing that makes it so awesome for learning English, is that once the AI is finished with your transcript, you can listen to the audio as you’re reading the transcript, and then you can click anywhere in the transcript, and the audio will jump to that section.

So just imagine the implications of this. Now you can take any audio file with spoken English, and you can upload it, have it transcribed for free, and then listen to it, click anywhere in the transcript, and listen to just that part. So if you find a section that you want to do some kind of listen-and-repeat practice for your pronunciation or your intonation, or just to kind of “wrap your mouth around” a new piece of language, it’s super, super easy to do now.

I think it’s just so great that you can go and find any podcast in English, anything that you want to listen to anything that you want to learn from, and it doesn’t matter if they have already given you a transcript or not. You can just upload the file and make your own which is super, super awesome.

The free plan on otter.ai does have some limitations. And one of those is that you can only transcribe 10 hours’ worth of audio per month. So every month it resets and you get another 10 hours. And the files that you upload can only be up to 40 minutes long. So if you have a super long, say, an epic Joe Rogan podcast that’s three hours long, you’re going to have to –before you upload it for transcription — you are going to have to cut that up into 40 minute segments if you want to transcribe the whole thing.

kind of difficult to explain these things in an audio podcast. So I have made a YouTube video where I just do a quick little demo to show you what it is and how you can use it and I’ve put the link to that in the show notes. So I hope I’ve managed to get you excited about the idea of giving Otter.ai try.

all I had for this time. I’m going to get back to work now and try to finish up that new episode for you, so you can look for that in the next couple of days. Until then, this is Lori signing off from Better at English headquarters, wishing you and inspired and productive day.

Bye for now!