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Amazon Music Launches New Features on its Podcasts
3 Nov, 2021 / 05:19 pm / Reeny Joseph

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Amazon Music Plans new features like automatically generated, synchronized transcripts on both iOS and Android in the US, meaning the transcripts will match the audio you’re hearing, and you can toggle around them to jump to specific parts of the audio. The transcripts are interactive and can be viewed full-screen or on top of the album art within the app.

More partners’ shows will receive transcripts in the future, says Kintan Brahmbhatt, director of podcasts at Amazon Music. The reason the team is being so hands-on with partners is that Amazon wants to be “one of the most creator-friendly, most podcaster-friendly, services out there,” he says.

Ads won’t be transcribed — the transcription will just say “audio not transcribed” over those breaks. Broadly, Brahmbhatt says the key thing he and the team wanted to accomplish with this launch was being able to navigate a podcast based on the written version, similar to how someone can scrub through a video.

Amazon Music is now both a music and podcast app, and it remains separate from Audible, which operates with a different payment model but also offers podcasts. Amazon Music has been pursuing various exclusive shows deals, including, most prominently, a deal with SmartLess for reportedly between $60 and $80 million, which gave the service a weeklong exclusivity window. Amazon also required hosting and monetization service Art19 and podcast network Wondery , which operates its own subscription podcast app called Wondery Plus.

As for Amazon’s competitors, Spotify has yet to widely roll out transcripts and is keeping them focused on select originals and exclusives. Spotify’s transcripts can be navigated in chunks, so you can’t tap on a word or phrase like you can in Amazon Music’s solution. Apple Podcasts doesn’t natively offer full transcripts, but show creators can transcribe shows themselves and include the written version in their show notes.