How to Enable Web Playback and Find Autotranscriptions in Google Podcasts
Google Podcasts is a relatively new podcast service, and while it is currently focused on the mobile app, there are a couple of features in the browser version that are usually not available. Specifically, users can play podcasts in their browser and extract automatically generated transcriptions for episodes with just a few tweaks.
Listen to podcasts in your browser
Typically, when you open a link to a Google Podcast episode in your desktop browser, you are taken to the Google Podcast app download page, rather than a direct link to the episode itself. However, as Android Police points out , a small URL change is enough to enable browser playback.
This workaround is likely to be replaced with a full featured web player in the future, but it is useful for now. You won’t be able to search, subscribe, or access other podcast feeds you subscribe to (you’ll need to pull each link directly), but your listening progress is synchronized between the web and app versions.
- Open the Google Podcasts app on your Android device.
- Find the episode you want to play in your browser.
- Click the More icon (three dots in a stack)> Share , then either send the link to yourself through one of the available apps, or copy the link to your clipboard and send / save it in another way so you can open it in your browser. PC or other devices.
- On your computer, copy and paste the release link in your browser.
- Change the first part of the URL from “www.google.com/podcasts” to “podcasts.google.com” (do not touch the next string of numbers and letters), then press Enter.
- You will be taken to the episode page in the app. You can click the play button to listen, or click the podcast title to open the episode list.
Find and search for automatically generated episode transcripts
Another hidden feature in Google Podcasts is auto-generated transcriptions, similar to the auto-caption feature for YouTube videos. These transcriptions are used as metadata in Google Podcasts (and will likely be searchable by users in the future). Currently, however, you can find these transcriptions with a little digging – although they do not replace listening to the show itself, since they appear as a single unformatted line of text, they are not very accurate and are not available for all podcasts or episodes.
As with the web player, this shaky workaround will likely be replaced at some point in the future, but for now, you can at least copy and save the transcriptions and search them yourself.
- Follow the steps above to post and edit the episode link from the Google Podcasts app so it can be played in the Chrome browser.
- With the episode page open, click the play button and then press F12 to open the page source window.
- Click the Networking tab at the top of the Home Page window, then click Answer from the drop-down list .
- The “Name” window will be filled with a list of files. Scroll through these files until you find the one that starts with “batchexecute? Rpcids =. “ Click here to open it in an adjacent window, then use the scroll tabs to find the transcription text. You can see an example in the screenshot above.
- You can copy the entire transcription by double-clicking to highlight the line that displays the transcription and then right-clicking> Copy.
- Paste this line into a text document (like Word, Google Docs, Notebook, etc.).
- Press Ctrl + F to search in a text document.