A guest's mic was bad for the whole episode. Can I still get a usable transcript?

Usually, but expect more manual fixing. Running the guest's track through a speech-enhancement tool such as Adobe Podcast Enhance or Auphonic before transcribing can help, because it reduces noise and evens out the level. Names and technical terms will still need checking. For future episodes, send guests a short mic and headphone guide before recording.

My show regularly has four or five guests. Will speaker labels work?

They work, but the more voices there are, the more labels you will need to correct, especially when two guests sound alike or talk over each other. The most reliable setup is recording each guest on their own track, which remote recording tools such as Riverside and Zencastr do. Then each track is one speaker and you don't depend on automatic labeling at all.

5 Tips for Getting Accurate Podcast Transcriptions

1. Record Clean Audio

The recording matters more than the transcription tool. What helps most:

A quiet, soft room. Echo from bare walls and background noise hurt a transcript more than an inexpensive mic does. Treat the room before upgrading gear.
Steady distance from the mic. Stay close and at the same distance, so the level doesn't swing every time you lean back.
A pop filter. Plosives ("p", "b") turn into bursts that blur words.
Levels that never clip. Distorted peaks lose syllables.

Remote guests should wear headphones, so your voice doesn't come back through their mic as echo.

2. Take Turns

Overlapping speech is the hardest thing for both transcription and speaker labels; usually one of the two voices is lost or garbled. Very fast speech and mumbled technical terms are the next most common problems. You don't need to talk unnaturally, just let people finish.

3. Set the Source Language

If your tool lets you choose the spoken language, choose it instead of relying on auto-detect. Detection can guess wrong, particularly with less common languages or a short intro in another language. Some tools also offer regional variants, such as Brazilian and European Portuguese.

If the show mixes languages (a bilingual host switching mid-sentence, say), set the main language and plan to fix the other-language passages by hand.

4. Edit in Priority Order

Even with clean audio, you'll have corrections. Spend the time on:

Proper nouns: guests' names, companies, products. These are the most common errors.
Jargon: domain terms often come out spelled phonetically.
Numbers and dates: check that they're right and written consistently.
Homophones: "their/there/they're" and similar.

Filler words ("um", "uh") only matter if you publish the transcript as text. For show notes and search they can stay.

5. Check Length Limits Before Long Episodes

A 90-minute episode is a large file. Before choosing a tool, check its maximum file length and size, and how it bills long files. Finding a cap halfway through a season is annoying.

Reusing the Transcript

Show notes with timestamps for the main topics
Quotes for social posts
Articles built from a strong segment
The full transcript on the episode page, for readers who prefer text and for search engines, which can index text on a page but not speech in an audio file

Where Picute Fits

You upload the episode (an audio or video file, or from Google Drive). Picute transcribes it in 60 languages with no length cap, speaker labels are an option, and the editor can remove filler words and silences. You export SRT or VTT, or an MP4 with captions burned in if you publish video. For video podcasts, Shorts Studio proposes short clip candidates from the full episode and outputs them as 9:16 clips with captions.

Transcription costs 1 credit per minute, so a 90-minute episode uses 90 credits. Sign-up includes 10 minutes; Starter ($15/month) includes 300 credits a month.