Fanscribed is a newly revamped service that provides free podcast transcriptions. Fanscribed describes itself as a “crowdsourcing ‘transcription engine’ designed to help your fans work together to create professional-level transcripts for your podcast.” So, if you’re a podcaster looking for transcriptions of your show, you ca use Fanscribed to gather a pool of your fans together, and those fans can collaborate over the Fanscribed website to make those transcriptions.
The service is currently in beta. And it really is free. Fanscribed states in the blog entry linked above, “We understand that many podcasts cannot afford transcriptions, even those that are funded by producers or advertisers. For this reason, we will always offer free use of our transcription engine to create public transcripts of podcasts!” Fanscribed is leveraging the power of crowdsourced labor to make the service free to podcasters. (It’s implied that the people actually doing the transcriptions are doing so as a token of appreciation for the podcasts they love.)