Plenty of platforms host and distribute podcasts, but those platforms don't always want to play nice with your listening device when it comes to closed captions. We found a great set of workarounds from James Cridland over at Podnews, and we will summarize them here.
The easy route (and we think you'll notice a fruit-based trend here), is to select a podcast from Apple Podcasts, and listen in on iOS device like iPhone or iPad. Apple Podcasts has embedded transcripts in all episodes since March 2024.
If you're listening on an Apple product (iOS 16 or newer, launched in September of '22) but streaming from a different podcast host, the Live Captions (beta) feature will furnish captions to your podcast.
The feature also captions other media played on your Apple product, including older pods without the embedded transcription. Notably, however, it's only currently available in the US and Canada.
Listening on a Google Pixel phone? A similar setting, Live Caption, overlays subtitles on podcasts and other audio. With a Pixel 6 or newer, it's available in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish as well as English. It's also offered as a setting on certain Android products.
Most Android phones utilize a workaround, and there's one major catch. You can play your audio while opening the "Live Transcribe and Sound Notifications" app, which is free from the App Store. It actually listens along, using the microphone to hear the audio and spit out a live-feedback transcript. It needs quiet, though, as loud spaces bring interference to the microphone and can confuse the transcription software.
Listening on a computer? That's very old-school of you. The secret here is selecting the right browser to enable captioning, and it's Google Chrome. The settings menu offers a 'live caption feature."
A big takeaway here: Most of these scenarios will get you captions even on older podcasts that don't have them embedded the way newer episodes do.
Finally, a last-resort hack: try switching your audio output from stereo to mono. In certain situations, this can trigger the captioning systems.
