Getting More Out Of Podcast Transcripts, Chapters, And Listener Interaction

We're digging into improved podcasting tools that can make your show easier to manage, easier to discover, and easier for listeners to engage with. (And the best part is its all built into your Buzzsprout account!)

Learn how better transcripts can help surface your episodes in search and AI tools, why chapter markers are getting more and more practical to use, and how listener interaction through Fan Mail is getting a big bump with replies and voicemail! 

Discussed in this episode:

• Automatic transcripts for more podcasters: why transcripts matter more than ever for accessibility, productivity, and discoverability
• Back catalog transcript generation: how to add transcripts to older episodes so your full archive becomes more useful
• Chapter markers inside the transcript editor: an easier way to add and adjust chapters while reviewing your transcript
• Bulk chapter editing: a faster workflow with the Express Chapter Editor for podcasters who already keep timestamps or chapter notes in their editing tools
• Fan mail replies: how to respond to listener messages without turning your podcast into another full-time inbox
• Listener voicemail submissions: a simple way for your audience to send voice messages you can feature in your episodes

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Transcript

Feedback Sandwich

Alban 0:00

All right, so I'd like to start this off with a compliment and then some grievances. Does that sound good? Oh, fine. Because I've I've learned Tom has been sending us like leadership advice. And I know that I'm supposed to put the grievance inside of like a compliment sandwich, is what I've heard. So first piece of bread on the compliment sandwich episode was very good. I drove into the office yesterday. I listened to Buzzcast as just a listener because I wasn't on last week. And it was really good. Great. Thank you. But also some grievances. Some features that I've been like itching to talk about for weeks. Yeah. You guys go explicitly like, we're not going to talk about it. And then you threw them all out.

Kevin 0:43

And I was all these exciting features. We teased them. We said, go check out fan mail, go check out transcripts, but we didn't say what was in there. Oh, but you teased it all.

Alban 0:52

Then you used Adobe Podcasts, which I've been pushing for for forever. Uh-huh. Yeah. And now we're back in Google Meet. We're not using our sweet Adobe Podcasts. And maybe even the worst part, you guys didn't even talk about your missing co-host. That's true. We left that out.

Jordan 1:08

I mean, it's one of those things like, you know, when you just like announce things, then they notice. So if we just didn't announce that you were gone, maybe no one would notice.

Kevin 1:16

Right. Do you ever like watch one of your favorite TV shows and they have a whole episode and like one of the main characters is just not in the whole episode? Yes. That's what we just did. But they don't call it out. They don't be like watching Seinfeld. They're not like Kramer won't be appearing this episode.

Alban 1:29

I don't think they have to say Kramer won't be here, but they kind of say something like, Man, can't believe Kramer's an upstate all week or something. Like they'll kind of throw it in like something happened that he's not there.

Kevin 1:41

The storyline just doesn't include Kramer. And last week the storyline didn't include Alban.

Alban 1:47

Well, I was on uh PTO. It was awesome to come back and listen to the episode that the two of you did. I thought it was really good. I would not have said in a 15-minute episode, Alban's not here, so that you waste 40% of the episode talking about what you're not gonna do.

Kevin 2:02

That's the same compliment. You started the sandwich with a compliment that you really enjoyed the show. It was good. You went with your grievance and then you came back to the same compliment.

Alban 2:09

I think you have to use a different compliment. That's how that's how sandwiches work, Kevin.

Kevin 2:14

It's the same type of bread. It's you don't use a different piece of bread. I thought we were gonna get two compliments. Starts with wheat and then pumper nickel on the other side. That doesn't count.

Alban 2:23

That's not a good sandwich. All right, I'm gonna keep working on the compliment sandwich, but I really want to talk about some of these features.

Improved Features To Make Podcasting Better

Jordan 2:30

Welcome back to Buzzcast, the podcast about all things podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. As we alluded to in the opening of this episode and in our last quick cast, we have some new features that I think are going to greatly improve your podcasting experience on Buzzsprout.

Free Automatic Transcripts

Alban 2:54

My favorite thing is when we take something that I think is good and we make it better and we make it better. And then you get to look back and you're like, whoa, we worked on that, started it five years ago, and have iterated 12 times and it's gotten so much better. And the thing I really am passionate about and proud of all of our work is we started working with podcast transcripts like seven years ago. And with the transcript tag and launching with partners, working with the script. Now transcripts have just gotten so, so much better. So they're on your podcast website. We're talking about how you can use them with AI. Kevin did a whole episode last week about it. And we've made the editor better. We've brought transcriptions in-house and we've improved the quality of them a ton. We've improved the speed of how fast things are transcribed. And then we rolled out two big, in my mind, updates to transcripts in this last few weeks. The first is that everybody on the new BuzzBrow paid plans gets all their episodes transcribed automatically for free. And so now it's part of what you get when you sign up for BuzzBrow. I mean, and we've seen so much more adoption the last week. Apple Podcasts obviously has had transcripts for quite a while, but transcripts are now coming to Overcast. And Marco has confirmed that he's going to use the transcripts that are in people's RSS feeds. He's not using them yet, but he's going to. And I just feel like so many of these things that were kind of in the vision that I think really Kevin had seven years ago, the final pieces are falling into place. It's come full circle. Transcripts are becoming kind of like first-class citizens in podcasting.

Jordan 4:34

This is another one of those features that has just come such a long way where it has made it so much more accessible to all podcasters. I mean, a lot of these tools and a lot of these advancements that we've gotten just in like various software or AI advancements have just made the podcasting experience so much easier. I remember it used to be really expensive to transcribe your episodes. Like I chose not to do it because I couldn't afford episode transcription. And now it's just we're adding it on, like, no big deal.

Alban 5:06

When it was human transcription, the original amount that we used to get was a dollar a minute. That was uh when we used Rev. And so I would transcribe some stuff for a dollar a minute. So $45 if you want to do an episode, or you can transcribe it yourself. And then I feel like the real big breakthrough was when Otter launched. I feel like otter was so much better at all the other automated transcripts. And then Whisper came out and everybody did their own flavor of Whisper transcripts. And then NVIDIA made some cool ones. It's just like everything keeps getting better. And now it's at the point where you don't have to think about it. You just upload your podcast to BusRoute. We transcribe it automatically. We're going to do a really good job. Then you can go into a really nice transcript editor if you want to clean anything up, but you can feel confident that you don't need to, and it's still going to be a highly accurate transcript. There's just so many pieces have kind of fallen into place where now it goes from being a big piece of the workflow, big cost or time suck. And now it's become, I don't really think about it, but I do get all the benefits of a transcript.

Kevin 6:16

So on the heels of the AI episode that we did, our last full episode where we talked about how you can use AI. And a lot of that was based around like the prerequisite to do the full set of research that we talked through was having transcripts for all your episodes. And so we had somebody write in on fan mail saying that they are on one of the newer plans and all of their new episodes that they're uploading are getting transcripts, but they have like a back catalog of episodes that don't have transcripts yet. And they were wondering how they get them. Yeah, what's the answer to that? So you can still get free transcripts. And the way you do it is you click into your old episode that doesn't have a transcript yet. And then right on the like what we we call it the episode detail page, but it's just an episode. So if you just click on episodes and then click into one that doesn't have a transcript, on the right-hand toolbar, there will be a link at the very top of that toolbar that just says generate automatic transcript. And if you click that, it will kick off the job to create that transcript. So you can go into each one of your episodes that doesn't have one and you can generate transcripts for your full that catalog. Nice. So if you're somebody who's on a legacy plan and you haven't had co-host enabled, and so you don't have transcripts for all your episodes, and you go ahead and you upgrade to one of the new plans. So now you're getting transcripts for the new ones, but you need to go back into all of your back episodes and get transcripts. That's how you do it. One click and you can kick off all the jobs. You don't have to wait for it to finish before you kick off the next one. You can click in, generate, click in, generate, click, generate, and just go through all of them that you want transcripts for.

Alban 7:38

And that's how you do it. I love it. Probably we'll talk about this later, but some of what we initially wanted out of podcast transcripts was increases in discoverability. We talked about that in like the first blog post I ever wrote on transcripts. And I think we always said, like, if people are trying to find this episode, they will. It's not doesn't match search your intent. But what's changed, at least in my world, has been I now am searching using Chat GPT a lot more. And they're much deeper searches. And so rather than it being three words, start a podcast, I'm writing something that's much more in depth. Like I'm looking for a podcast episode about this and this, and I kind of want it to be like maybe this guest or that guest. And I put a big thing in and it runs like 20 searches, and then it comes back with a few podcast episodes. And I often find now the episodes that I'm recommended are episodes that have full podcast transcripts. And I think it's because, you know, people are searching best credit cards. Everybody in the world was optimizing for that. But if they type in, you know, if you're searching something like Chad GPT searching, something more in depth like interviews with CEOs of credit card companies, then it's so much more long tail. Then all these podcast transcripts start ranking for a lot of things, especially if you're asking for podcasts, those are the ones that are showing up. And I don't know, I feel like I found so many high-quality indie shows that I'd never heard of before that were kind of in the wheelhouse of things I would have been interested in, but I'd never discovered until I started searching this way.

Jordan 9:19

It's funny because for a long time I thought that AI could like watch videos on the internet. I don't know why. I didn't realize, like it didn't occur to me that it was actually going through the transcripts that you know YouTube provides or that it's finding on these websites. I actually thought it was listening to it. So I'm sure I'm not alone in this. But yeah, you you do need to have transcriptions on your videos or on your uh audio for it to surface in these AI chat bots or also in like Google Gemini, I imagine, things like that.

Alban 9:53

It seems to be a benefit. And I've just kind of kept seeing this come up. And so every time we make an improvement for transcripts, I go, this is really nice. I ran a search today that was like thinking through writing a blog post about this episode that Kevin just led us through a couple weeks ago about using AI and podcasts. And I was trying to think it come up with a unique angle. And I think I just said Kevin talking about AI and podcasts. And it came back and said, I think you're talking about this episode of Buzzcast. And it pulled up the Buzzcast episode. That's so crazy. Oh, I forgot to put that URL or any of the content about the episode, but just Kevin and AI and podcasts. It went out and found it, figured out who it was, figured out the content, pulled the transcript in. And I went, Yeah, I'm glad that we have those transcripts out there. So much more of our content is legible to AI agents and all these chatbots.

Jordan 10:49

You know what's so crazy about that, Alban, is I actually saw a Reddit post over this weekend, and it was someone saying, Hey, I found this clip of a podcast on YouTube. But what it was was someone else, like a third party, had clipped a video podcast episode, didn't give credit to the podcaster. They just had that clip running. And the person was like, Who is this? I can't find it. Like, I think it's a Scotch person. And so I was able to go into Chat GBT because I wanted to see if AI could find this episode just based on what I knew about the clip. And so I literally wrote, like, help me find a podcast episode in which Chris Williamson is discussing how he's successful in podcasting. He talked about how the importance of having an email newsletter. He talked about this book and it had novel raffica in it, the thumbnail styles of clips. And he mentioned how Lex Friedman set the tone for using timestamps, things like that. And I was like, I think the interviewer is a Scottish podcaster, but I can't find the episode. And it literally found the exact episode that the person was looking for. And it took me one minute and 24 seconds to find this episode. That's awesome. I know, is that crazy? But yeah, that's that's how cool it is.

Alban 12:00

Another big update that we did is inside the transcript editor, you can now add chapter markers. And those chapter markers are another piece of data that you're giving to not just your listeners, but also any AI that's going to be reading this transcript. Here is a change. You know, here's a different section of the podcast. And so when you know, when you're talking about using timestamps or chapters, that has gotten so much easier. So you're reading through the transcript, you're checking to make sure Alban is spelled correctly. And then you go, oh, this is actually a really good spot for my chapter, or I'm gonna change my chapter. You can go and change it right there in the transcript editor. And it feels to me so much more natural because now I'm just looking at the words rather than scrubbing through the audio trying to find the spot.

Jordan 12:52

Yeah. And I use co-host AI, which automatically generates the chapters for you. And what I've really enjoyed about this is it's been so spot on that when I'm editing the transcript, sometimes I'm like, oh, there actually was a change in a segment or a point that we made that would be a good chapter. And it's really fun to see that. But the thing that I love about adding the chapters to the transcript editor, especially as someone who is, you know, doing this post-production work, is that I don't have to click into the chapters. I mean, we have this awesome chapter editor, but it's it's like an extra step. And so we're going through the chapters and you're dragging the timestamps and listening through and things like that. And there is something so much easier about being in the transcript editor. And then you just notice, oh, you know what? Actually, this was the start of a new segment. You just click in there, you click add chapter, and then you can, if you want later, go into the chapter marker editor page, but it's like one less step. It's one less page to go into and adjust. And it's really cool.

Alban 13:58

It feels more natural to me. Yeah. That I'm thinking in, I'm kind of reviewing this transfer. I'm just scrolling through and I go, that's a chapter. Or I've got the co-host chapters already showing there. And I go, okay, I'm going to tweak that title. I like this title a little different. It works better with the way I think of chapters. And so I was really excited when I saw that we were building that. And then when I started getting to use it, it feels natural the way that I kind of think about podcast chapters and transcripts. So those two combined might be my favorite updates to BuzzSprout in a long time. So let me tell you a little story.

Bulk Chapter Editing For Power Users

Kevin 14:31

I'm glad you guys led with all those benefits. This is why we do the stuff that we're doing, but I'm going to tell you a story about how we got here. So originally uh years ago, we launched the chapters tool within BuzzSprout. Honestly, it was not the easiest thing in the world to use. It became a bit of a power user tool. Like you could quickly add chapters if you knew where the timestamps were. If you were the type of podcaster who took good notes while you're editing or while you're recording and put down timestamps, you could go in and quickly put those in there. But if you had to scrub through your episode to find them, it was a little bit hard to do that. And that's when we came back to it and decided we wanted to make an improvement there. Chapters have become more popular. A lot of platforms are starting to auto-generate chapters if you don't have chapters, which it can be uh it's a double-edged sword. Like sometimes it does a good job, sometimes it doesn't. It's nice to be able to have control over them if you don't like the auto chapters that are generated. So this is why it became an important thing for us to be able to provide for podcasters. So we've released a more user-friendly version of the chapters tool. Well, people who are new to chapters loved it. And you can do it on your mobile device, and it's more drag and drop and just easy to use, but the power users were a little bit frustrated by it. And so now we circled back and we said, okay, like how do we come back now and answer the question of for power users who know where they want their chapters to be, what's a tool that we can provide for them? The first thing that we wanted to do was we have this great transcript editor. And we thought, that's probably a great time. If you're editing a transcript anyway, if you're going through and you're making word corrections or whatever, or even if you're not, if you just are you can visually scan when I change from one topic to the next and hit enter twice and go ahead and add a chapter and type it in. That's super easy. So that's another way to do chapters. We went ahead and rolled that out. It's fantastic, it's fast, it's accurate, it's easy to add, easy to remove, all that. But then there's all this other stuff that also comes along with chapters. Like sometimes you want to put an image in, sometimes you want to put a link in. You can do all that through the chapter tool. So you can add your chapters in the transcript. They're all compatible with each other. I love this. Like the cross-functionality. If you want to quickly go add chapters to the transcript tool, do that. And then hop over to the chapter tool and click on the chapters that you just created and add an image or add a link or remove the title, but leave the timestamp if you want it to kind of be like an invisible chapter. There's lots of fun stuff you can do with that. And surprise for you guys, because you don't even know this is coming. But I just pinged one of our awesome programmers on the team and said, is this going to be out by Friday? And he said, Yes. It's good. And he said the pressure's on now, but yes, he's working. Well, it's going to be out. Um, we have a super power power user way to add chapters.

Jordan 16:59

Wait a second.

Kevin 17:00

Yep. This is and this is the uh bulk chapter editor.

Jordan 17:04

Oh.

Kevin 17:05

So now when you go to the chapter tool, so you click into your episode and you click on edit the chapters, you have the new like streamlined, easy-to-use chapter editor. And underneath that, there'll be a link that'll be like, I can't remember exactly what it says, but something about bulk managing chapters. You click that, and basically a text box opens up. And you can just type in there like you would to create YouTube chapters, like in a in a YouTube video description. Yeah. You can just type in there and it's really smart. Like it takes almost any kind of input and reformats it correctly, and it just creates the chapter. So you can just type timestamp and then space and then uh the title of your chapter and hit return and type another timestamp, space, the title of your chapter, hit return. And you can just type them all in or copy and paste them from a document if you already have them, and then hit save. It will interpret all that data correctly, like even if you kind of botch the format and create all those chapters for you. Oh, that's really nice.

Jordan 17:54

And then you can click on them and yeah, because I I'll do chapter markers in Adobe Audition. And I will often just make like a quick note about what the chapter is. Like if it's a segment, like I'll just do, you know, 58 something and they'll say fan mail or you know, talk about this. And that would be really cool to just copy the text box on Adobe Audition that has my markers and just slap it into that bulk edit. You will be able to. It's really cool.

Kevin 18:21

Yep.

Jordan 18:22

Awesome.

Kevin 18:22

And so if you don't like the chapters that co-host creates for you, for example, you can hit the bulk chapter editor and it will open up with all the chapters that co-host created in in there for you. Select all, delete, paste them in from Adobe Edition. You just replaced all your chapters, like lickety split.

Jordan 18:37

Wow. It's really funny to me that you call this like the super, super power user version of it. Because in my mind, it's like the ultra, super lazy version is like just like copying and paste.

Kevin 18:49

It depends on how you edit. Like you're using a professional grade editing tool and you're creating chapters in there as you go. And so that's a power user workflow.

Jordan 18:58

That's true.

Kevin 18:58

And so that's why I call it that. Even though the UI to do it in Buzzbroute is super easy, it's really just a big text box and just paste your chapters in.

Jordan 19:04

Yeah.

Kevin 19:04

But however you want to do it. Now, if you want to drag and drop and create your chapters manually by scrubbing through your audio, there's a great UI for that. If you want to, you know, copy and paste from an editor or just from handwritten notes and just paste them into a text box, you can totally do that. Or if you're going to edit your transcript anyway and you just want to, while you're editing your transcript, drop chapters in, you can do them there.

Alban 19:23

That feels the most natural to me because I would be reading through that transcript and I'd go, this is where the chapter should be, or I want to tweak this one from co-host. And it's almost just like putting a header, you know, over the paragraph that's just the transcript. I go, okay, that's a this is a new section. And I add the section right there.

Kevin 19:43

Yeah.

Alban 19:43

Rather than being like on YouTube where I'm in the description. And I'm like, I don't remember where the 12, 18 second, what was happening right there. That doesn't feel natural to me, but reading a document and saying it's right here, that feels natural. Yeah.

Jordan 19:58

Yeah. I love how it's just the simplest form is like copy and paste into this like text box editor. And then the step above that is while you're editing your transcript, you can just click in there and add them as a Word document. And then the step above that, in my mind, is going in and adding links or adding custom images to your chapters. And so we have all these different ways to access this tool for different types of podcasters. I think that's really cool.

Kevin 20:27

Yeah, it really is great. And like I said, no matter how you do it, they all talk to each other. So as you create chapters in one, you could flip over to the other tool and they'll be there as well. And you can edit them there. I mean, we figured when we create a chapter, when you create a chapter through the BuzzBrout UI, we have to create that chapter like four or five different ways anyway. We create it in the RSS file. We we create it for PodLove Simple Chapters, we create it for the podcast namespace. We put it in the ID3 tag of the MP3. So it's like we're already creating them like six different ways after you make them. So why not give you six different ways to make them in the beginning, anyway?

[Ad] The Fresh Patch Podcast - Where Good Pets Get It.

Alban 21:00

No matter how you make them or where you want them to go, we'll figure it out. That's what we're trying to do. There was a period where we were fighting so hard. We were like, just put them in the RSS feed. Use like the podcasting 2.0 standard. This is the way to go. Everybody get on board. And there was some point where we just kind of kept adding. We were like looking around at, you know, some apps were still using the ID3 tags. One day I was using Spotify for something and I was like, they support PodLove. And that was the last one we went, you know, let's get it into Spotify. And so now we've got it literally in every way that you could possibly do it. And so every podcast app that supports chapters is going to show up.

Jordan 22:02

All right. And another feature that I have just absolutely loved, it's really funny because we actually started the iteration of it on this podcast because of the needs that we had. And then we implemented it as a feature on BuzzSprout as fan mail, which we've always had this thing where, you know, listeners could write in and then we read the fan mail in a segment. On the episode, or we work it into the episode. And it has always worked so well for us. But we had so many people say, hey, that's actually not exactly the way that that works for my podcast, right?

Kevin 22:34

Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of shows that have taken advantage of fan mail, and it's been a huge win for a lot of podcasters. And that's fantastic. But as time has gone on, we've heard more and more that fan mail doesn't work for every show. And we knew that, like anytime we build a feature, we never expect 100% adoption, but we want to be able to impact as many podcasters with this in a positive way with everything that we build as we can. And so uh there are a lot of shows that it's just not appropriate. It's not the right type of show to be able to read back fan mail on the show, or it's not the right type of show to ask a question and get, you know, answers from your audience. Even if you do have a show like that, every message that comes in is not appropriate to share in that way. Some of them are personal, some of them are private. Some of them are just, you know, I really like your show. They're just like a kudos and it feels like you're patting yourself on the back when you read it. And really what you want to be able to do is just respond to that one message. And so even though that hasn't been a huge itch that we've had to scratch, enough feedback has come in from BuzzBrock customers saying, I really love fan mail, but ultimately it's just, it's not working well enough for me. And here's why.

Jordan 23:36

Yeah.

Kevin 23:37

And so we've been able to collect that information. We've been able to uh brainstorm it with the team. We've been able to come up with a way that you can now reply to your fan mail privately and succinctly without becoming another messaging app that you have to monitor all the time. And so uh it took us a while to kind of figure this out, took us a little while to implement it. And it is out, it is working. If you have written into Buzzcast in the past couple of weeks, you might have gotten a reply from one of us. And I'm super excited that it's rolled out for everybody.

Jordan 24:06

And we've actually done it in a little bit of a different way. So, Kevin, you mentioned that you didn't want this to be like another messaging app that you have to manage. What exactly did you mean by that? Like what kind of parameters did we put around our fan mail responses?

Kevin 24:20

Yeah, like the idea, like I don't want that. I don't want another messaging app that I have to monitor all the time. I already have my messages and I've got a few WhatsApp groups that I'm a part of. And uh my kids hit me up on Instagram messages or they, you know, like a lot of people use Snapchat and Discord. Like you have enough of that.

Jordan 24:37

Yeah.

Kevin 24:38

But what you don't have is a good way to interact with people who just want to reach out and share something with you based on something you did in your podcast. Yeah. And then a very simple way to be able to respond one time. It shouldn't open up a long, like back and forth, like, you know what I mean. Like there is a difference between being able to acknowledge that I received your message and thank you for it, or share a little piece of advice or answer a quick question and a messaging app where you feel like at any time of the day or night, whether it has anything to do with my episode or not, now this person has a way to contact me. That's not what we're trying to accomplish. Yeah. We were just trying to accomplish, oh, you're listening to the episode. They said something that was interesting to you, and you want to shoot them a quick message. And now the person can say, hey, thanks for that. That's really meaningful that you shared that. Uh, and thanks so much for listening to this podcast. It means the world to me. Send. That's it. And you can't initiate messages, you can't send another one until they send you another fan mail.

Jordan 25:30

Which I love.

Kevin 25:31

Yeah. So there are some parameters around it that might feel a little restrictive, but it's because we're not trying to provide a messaging app. We're not trying to open up a new, you know, private thread for you and every individual listener of your episode. We're trying to solve a very specific problem in a very elegant way.

Alban 25:48

Yeah. WhatsApp already does this really well. iMessage does this really well. Whatever messaging protocol you use with your friends, whether it be Discord or anything, there's lots of good options. And as soon as we looked at it, we're like, the minute we open up, you can reply. Okay, do we start doing like reactions? What about custom backgrounds? Can you have groups? Can you add people to the group? And it's like you go so far and you go, oh, we're trying to build WhatsApp so that people can say thank you. Right. And we're like, what if we just let people say thank you? Yeah. And so replies are pretty limited. And if you end up wanting to take this relationship to the next level, you can send them your phone number if you want. Yeah. Or you can start a WhatsApp group for your podcast. Sure.

Kevin 26:31

Yeah. You can do whatever you want.

Alban 26:32

Send them a Discord or whatever you want to do. We're not trying to get into the messaging world. But this feels really good because, you know, Kevin said he didn't feel the pain. I sometimes did where someone would just write in, I love the show. And it feels a little weird to have a whole segment where, like, oh, uh, somebody in Maine said they love the show. Somebody in Tajikistan said they really enjoy listening to it on their commute. And you're like just reading through all these messages. Or you could just reply to them and say, Thank you. It means a lot to get these messages from you. Yep.

Leave Fan Voicemails!

Jordan 27:03

There was like a couple times where we'd have someone write in and it would almost be like a podcast support question where they would like write in, they'd be like, Hey, I can't get the episode in something like, can you help? And I'm like, I don't, I don't know. I can't, that's not something I'm I'm not gonna do like support help desk over our podcast episode. And so yeah, I think it's gonna be really useful for situations like that, or even just asking listeners, hey, I really love the story that you shared with me. Are you okay if I share this on my podcast? Like, do you give me permission? It's a great use for that. And then on top of being able to reply to famails, if that's not good enough. Now listeners can also leave voicemails. So let's talk about this a little bit.

Kevin 27:48

Yeah, it's been it's been a big couple of weeks.

Jordan 27:50

Yeah.

Kevin 27:51

The voicemail feature, I love this idea. I have no idea yet how popular it's going to be. As a podcaster, I like talking. Uh, I love talking with you guys and sharing our thoughts on certain topics and putting them out to the world. I don't know how many people on the listening end feel like, oh, I got to comment on that. I want to say something about that. And I would prefer to use my voice to do it as opposed to writing. I think it's gonna be less than the number of like text messages that we get, but I'm excited that the potential exists for somebody to share their thoughts with us in an audio format that we can then put into an episode. Yeah. So we're not just hearing, oh, so-and-so from Maine wrote this. We're actually saying, oh, this person from whatever, however we want to describe it, you know, send us a voicemail. Let's take a listen. And you can actually hear their voice. I just feel like that's pretty cool, right? And I might be incentivized as a listener to be like, oh, they play voicemails that they get from their show sometimes. That's part of the thing that they do. Um, if that works for your show, then maybe this feature works for you. It's and again, trying to build everything as simple as possible. So we're making it really easy on the user interface side for anybody who's non-technical, just to be able to click the link to send a fan mail, choose where they want to send a voicemail or a text that choose voicemail and from your smartphone, from your computer, just ask for access access to your microphone. And then you record in 321. You can record up to a minute, type in your name and your email address, hit send, boom, voicemail delivered.

Jordan 29:13

Yeah.

Alban 29:14

I was convinced that this was a good idea because of Jordan's voicemail on Hot News Weekly Review. So Hot News Weekly Review does anybody who's a supporter gets to record their predictions for the year. And Jordan's a supporter, so she did it. And it was really nice to listen to that episode and hear people's voices, and they're just talking about what they thought would happen in podcasting. Really well done. And then I thought about you know, the only way in my mind, the reason this is working is because it's a show for podcasters. And so most of the people who are sending that stuff in are used to recording on their equipment. They can clip it, then they can email it over. Like we're all pretty technical around audio stuff. And then Kevin's talking about, you know, I think it's time to do audio recording so people can put it in. I I it actually sounds really good to me now because we're going to open up way more shows that could use this. Yeah. And you know, this has been a feature of different apps and people have used Google Voice numbers and all sorts of different workarounds. Right. It's nice just to put it into Buzzsprout. And we say we know probably 10% of podcasters will use this regularly. A few percent will use it sometimes, and most probably won't because they don't have listeners calling in. But for the people who use it, I think it's gonna be really nice. You just get a message in your Buzzsprout app and it says, you've got fan mail and you go, and some of that fan mail is text that you could reply to, and some of it is audio that you can add to your next episode. It feels really nice to me. I'm excited for us to use it, which is just always a good indicator that I think the feature's done well when I start imagining how we'll use it on Buzzcast.

Kevin 30:58

Yeah, I've always felt like those third-party services that you just mentioned, uh, I mean, Google Voice is one, SpeakPipe is another, and there's a bunch of others that have been branded specifically as a podcaster solution. I've always felt like they're so clunky. It's just weird if somebody says, like, leave us a message on our SpeakPipe, and I and I click a link from their show notes and I go to this, like, I've never heard of SpeakPipe. What is this? Is this safe for me? It's wanting access to my microphone or whatever. And so what we've done is we've like taken time to make the UI professional looking and branded with your podcast artwork. So they just feel safe and comfortable that they click the link from your show notes, they landed on a page that has your podcast artwork, and it just feels clean and safe and like it's going to you. Like after you send the message, you get an acknowledgement that it's, you know, was delivered to this podcast successfully. It feels like the right way to handle simple voice messages that you want to be able to send to your podcaster as opposed to using a third party. And those third parties, you know, for better or worse, they have to pay their bills. So they have to charge something additional. So this is included with your Buzzsprout account.

Jordan 31:57

Yeah. And as the person leaving a voicemail, I've actually called into like a couple called into. I've left voice messages. And some of the platforms that they've gone through, I've had to go and create an account before I can leave a voicemail. Have you ever encountered that? And it feels like too much friction where I'm just thinking, like, uh, do I actually want to do this? Do I actually want to leave a voicemail for this person? Like, I don't know if I need my email tied to another like website. And so it's really cool to be able to just click that fan link on their podcast website and then, you know, choose what microphone you're using or whatever, and then record it. And if you mess up, it's nice because you can just like trash that recording and re-record. Yep. And then just when you submit it, just put your name and email and then send it. It's it's just so clean. It's so easy. And yeah, I really enjoyed that experience.

Alban 32:52

As soon as something's requiring you to sign up and put in your email and your password, the chances you're gonna do it have gone down like 80%.

Jordan 32:59

Yeah.

Alban 32:59

You know, I go to a website and I'm trying to read about a news story and I click the Wall Street Journal and it puts up, it's like, oh, no, actually, is it paywall? I go, oh, and I go back and I end up on like people.com with like 400 ads because I'm like, at least I don't have to sign up for something. I can just like try to see the outline of this story real quick.

Kevin 33:19

Yeah. And we haven't talked about yet one of the coolest things, which is that we made it all work with all the stuff that you're used to seeing in fan mail already. So if you run one of the Buzzsprout native apps on your iPhone or your Android device and you have fan mail enabled, when you get fan mail, you get a push notification. And that push notification kind of gives you the first uh, you know, sentence or two of the fan mail to give you a preview of what it is, and you can tap it and jump right into the app and see the whole thing. So when voicemails are left, they get transcribed. We automatically transcribe them, and you get your push notifications, you get your emails, just like somebody who sent you a text message because it turns it into text. And then you can click on it, you can jump into the app, you can read it if you're not in a place where you can listen to it. You can also listen to it, of course, because you want to be able to hear their voice. You can download that audio if you want to use it in your podcast. If somebody sends you something that's ugly and you don't want to see them anymore, just you know, block it. It goes to the blocked folder. And so anybody who sends from that same email address again will, you know, not land in your fan mail inbox. It'll land in the blocked side. So it all works in the whole fan mail ecosystem, just like you're used to everything else working in fan mail.

Jordan 34:23

Yeah. And you can pin them to your website, right?

Kevin 34:25

Yes.

Jordan 34:26

Because it transcribes it.

Fan Mail

Kevin 34:27

Yes, because it transcribes it. If somebody just says, I just dropping a quick note to say how much I enjoy your podcast and thank you so much for doing the work that you do. This is Kevin from Florida. Keep up the great work. And you're like, oh, that's beautiful. I want to put that on, like highlight that as a fan mail message on my website. You can hit pin to website just like you could if they texted you. So to go back to where I started, fan mail has been this amazing tool for Buzzcast. And like I said, others, a bunch of other podcasts that are similar in structure to the way that we run our show. But it wasn't a solution for everybody. With these two new additions, what we're really trying to do is expand the impact that fan mail can have across more podcasters that use Buzzsprout. And I really hope it does that. Uh, if it does, we would love to hear from you. If you tried fan mail in the past, but weren't it wasn't a good fit for your show because you weren't able to respond, or you uh like texting didn't work for whatever reason. You just wanted, you know, voicemail, maybe that's compelling, or it has been successful for you, and now you're excited to try this voicemail thing and you get a voicemail in the next week or two. We would love to hear from you. Please share those stories with us. We hope it really helps you not only enjoy podcasting more, but be more successful, interact and connect with your audience more. It's why we're doing the things that we're doing.

Jordan 35:41

All right, let's get into fan mail, which I think for this episode is going to be a new segment, which is fun fact check with our history correspondent John Corey.

Alban 35:53

What? John, you need to start setting these in with the uh voicemail so that we can get the audio from you.

Jordan 35:59

Yeah. So he had some two cents to put in for some of our like offhand things we mentioned. And he's like, well, actually. So that's maybe the maybe that's what it is.

Kevin 36:09

I can appreciate that. Well, actually, with John Corey. Yep. Well, actually with John Corey. I love it.

Alban 36:14

Uh the first one was Alban was very close, and I'm shocked Kevin had almost no clue. Maybe it's an H thing.

Kevin 36:21

An age thing?

Alban 36:22

Okay. Where are we going with this? Well, it's the breaking news sound effect is a ghost of the teletype era because sending data over wires was incredibly expensive. The machines only clattered when a story was too important to wait for the morning paper. So we've been Pablovian trained to associate the mechanical staccato with urgency. So news stations still use the sound today to make you feel like you're witnessing history in real time.

Jordan 36:49

That makes so much sense.

Alban 36:51

This makes me think of a story I heard from uh somebody with a young kid, and they had a coaster that was a floppy drive. Uh-huh. And their kid goes, Oh, you printed out the save icon. And they're like, save icon. And they're like, This is a floppy disk. And they went, Oh, you, the only time you've ever seen this shape has been on a save icon in Microsoft Word.

Speaker 3 37:14

Yes.

Alban 37:14

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin 37:15

All right. Oh, we have to challenge the age comment. Because I just did a quick Google search here. And the teletype was invented in the early 1900s and phased out almost completely by the 1980s. So, moment of truth here. I was born in 77. So by the time I was three, this thing was gone. And Alban is younger than I am. So fair enough. I will say fair enough. I probably should have known. And I knew it had something to do with breaking news and in newsrooms and all that stuff. But come on, by the time I was even in middle school, no one, no one was using this stuff. This is why we like fun fact check with John Corey.

Alban 37:48

Yeah. Yeah. It is good.

Jordan 37:49

All right. And our our next fun fact, earblind.

Alban 37:52

Yes.

Jordan 37:53

This is a reference to our last episode.

Alban 37:54

Because this is not just fun fact. This is fact-checking Kevin. He didn't come after Kevin with every one of these.

Jordan 38:01

John Corey says a major airline teaches its staff to greet every passenger when they step onto the plane. And as part of the training, you learn to have 12 different ways to say hello. So while you're speaking to a specific passenger, the one before and a few after will hear what you say. So changing for each one shows care about the individual rather than being on auto-repeat loop. Small differences have a high impact. I think that fully supports our call to action about like switching things up a little bit.

Kevin 38:29

It does. I'm just trying to think of 12 different ways to say deafness. I came up with one other way that makes no sense. Ear blindness.

Alban 38:38

Wait, I think he's saying earblindness, that if you hear the same thing over and over, you kind of it starts to not have any meaning.

Kevin 38:45

Oh my gosh. Now I just set him up to roast me again.

Alban 38:51

John Corey's uh sending you in a voicemail as we speak. Yeah. I do really like this because I know that when we're at conferences and I've had similar conversations with people about their podcast 10 times in a row, that I start to sound like a robot.

Jordan 39:06

Yeah.

Alban 39:06

And I always feel bad because a lot of times they're really interesting stories about someone's podcast. And I know I'm starting to seem like I'm not interested because I'm just saying the same exact words, like, oh, tell me more about that. And it might be good, even just for myself, not that they would ever hear me learn the 12 different ways to say hello and 12 different ways to ask about a podcast, but it's probably good for me so that I don't feel like I've just fallen into the auto-repeat loop. Yeah.

Jordan 39:34

And actually, speaking of saying the exact same thing over and over, the last two episodes we have mentioned that the topic for our next episode is going to be how listeners find their next podcast that they listen to. And so we are once again going to ask because we actually, I don't know, it wasn't like really part of the plan, but we had a lot to say about some of the new things available to uh podcasters on BuzzBrow.

Kevin 40:01

And I just sometimes our production calendar doesn't align perfectly with our Buzzcast content calendar.

Jordan 40:07

Yeah.

Kevin 40:07

And I apologize for that.

Jordan 40:09

But yeah, so we we kind of went a little overboard with it, but we were just very excited about these new features. And so I guess once again, what we're gonna do is just ask for listeners to send in how they have found their most recent podcast binge, but now we have a new way for them to send in their submissions. You can actually tap the text show link in the show notes on the website and then record your message to us about how you find your next podcast, how you find new podcasts.

Post Show: Airport Snack Dilemmas

Alban 40:37

I love that. Tell us the story, how you're finding podcasts. Uh, and I'm excited to hear people tell us that story. I do have to ask, please try to keep them tight so that Jordan doesn't have to edit them down herself. Because she will edit it down. I will. If you were like Kevin and I and record with her every week, you'd see we might have two hours of recording and then Jordan's chopped your segment down to 15 minutes.

Kevin 41:00

Well, the the voicemail recording is limited to a minute. So you're technically limited to a minute, but Jordan reserves the right to even cut it down further from there. So that's true. Keep it tight, get some good air time.

Jordan 41:11

All right. Well, I'm excited for that. So until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.

Kevin 41:20

Jordan Alban, do you have time for an honesty exercise?

Jordan 41:24

Yes.

Kevin 41:25

Yes.

Jordan 41:25

Are you exercising our honesty or are you exercising yours?

Kevin 41:29

I want to I want to hear your honest. I had a situation that I had to make a decision on.

Jordan 41:33

Oh, okay. Okay.

Kevin 41:34

I want to paint this picture. I want to set the scenario for you, and I want to hear what you guys would have done. All right. Set the scene. I just did some travel last week. I'm telling you, this is a true story. All right. So imagine yourself in an airport on a full day of travel and somewhere you're on a layover, and I want you to envision if you're going to walk into one of these airport snack stands, whether it may be a newsstand or a little restaurant sell snacks or something like that. Yeah. Think of the one thing you're looking for. Like the perfect snack mid-travel day on connections of flights. Okay. Do you have this snack in your head?

Jordan 42:06

I haven't.

Kevin 42:06

Now don't share that. I just want you to hold that in your head. All right. Alban, it's taking you a while to think think of the snack. Come on.

Alban 42:12

Yeah. I mean, I've I I've got one.

Kevin 42:14

One came to mind. Yeah, it's fine. It's what you it's kind of your default go-to, right?

Jordan 42:18

I've got two.

Kevin 42:18

It's fine. Actually, two is perfect because two is what happened.

Jordan 42:21

Yes.

Kevin 42:22

All right. Now, hold that vision in your mind. Now you're walking into the restroom in an airport. Okay. And you've you finish up in the restroom, you go to the sink, you wash your hands, you turn to where the paper towels come out, and there's a little steel shelf on the top of that. And sitting on top of that shelf is that exact snack sealed, unopened, in a container. No, the answer is no way. Hang on. You turn around and you looked around in the restroom and there's no one else in there. There's no one else. It's all alone. Somebody bought exactly what you want for yourself and left it for you in the bathroom. And you know how much this stuff in the airports costs. Like, oh, sure, if you were at a general convenience store by your house, it would be $7. But here it's $23 and it's sitting here in a sealed package for me in the restroom and there's nobody else in here. Now, did somebody leave it here five minutes ago? I don't know. Did they leave it here three days ago? I don't know. Do I take it and enjoy it or do I leave it? Might they come back? Absolutely not. No, you do not take that.

Jordan 43:20

I would leave it. I just, this is a huge point of contention for me. Like if my husband finds something cool out in the wild, like out in public, I am always team, like, leave it. Someone's gonna come back for it.

Kevin 43:31

Leave it. They're coming back. But they could be halfway to Wichita by now.

Alban 43:34

You're in an airport. No one's there for a very long time. I'm not even thinking that they're gonna come back for it. I'm just thinking airport restroom is like one of the only places that I'm not grabbing it.

Kevin 43:44

You're not eating anything that's come out of a restroom that's gone in and out of the airport restroom.

Alban 43:48

I was thinking, what do I do if I'm going into the restroom? It's going into the backpack before I go in there.

Kevin 43:53

You have to have a protective coating around it before it enters the white sick all the time.

Jordan 43:58

Like you can't be scared of the germs.

Alban 44:00

I'm not, I feel like I don't think I have like a germophobe. I just think that's one area that I'm like unknown snack out of an airport restroom. And you guys are going, oh, don't be a germophobe.

unknown 44:13

That's pretty far.

Jordan 44:16

But it's sealed. It's fine.

Kevin 44:18

It was sealed. That was that was the the it really like if it was open. It's a no-brainer.

Alban 44:23

So what's the snack for you, Kevin? What what what were they?

Kevin 44:25

Maybe this would matter. Okay, it was like seasoned cashews, a big bag of seasoned cashews, which you know that's at least $10 or $12 at the point. That is big. That's expensive. And then dehydrated fruit in two sealed bags.

Jordan 44:38

Oh.

Alban 44:39

Okay, so somebody lost like $45 of food in an airport bathroom. Yes.

Kevin 44:43

So valuable.

Jordan 44:44

Oh.

Kevin 44:44

And so yummy.

Jordan 44:45

I was thinking of uh like the fruit and yogurt parfaits that they sell, and then like the Hillshire Farms like adult lunchables. Those are my favorite things. Yeah.

Alban 45:00

So you took it.

Jordan 45:01

Honestly, like now hearing it, I'm like, oh man, cashews and dried fruit, ooh. Yep. That would be pretty good and pretty easy to just slip into your bag.

Kevin 45:10

I will tell you this. I left it because the combination between somebody spent a lot of money on this and they might return, and I have to take it from a bathroom to eat it. Uh equaled leave it for now. But I will also tell you that I regretted it majorly halfway through that next flight. I was like, I should have at least gone and bought it for myself, but I didn't. I was halfway on that next flight and it was so turbulent that they suspended the like snack and beverage service. Oof. And so we're on a three-hour flight with nothing to drink and nothing to eat. And I was just thinking of those cashieries and dried fruit the whole time. I was like, why did you not grab those? The Lord put them there for your provision.

Alban 45:49

Oh man. Kevin, so I've got a new travel tip, but I want to hear your opinion on this. We traveled for spring break last week, and my wife is really good at the like credit card upgrade stuff. Yeah. And so we've got this Delta card, and so we got some status through it, and then we got a flight for free, and then she got some upgrades on it. And what it culminated with was we paid for like normal seats, and we end up getting upgraded all the way to Delta One, which are like the lay in a bed seat. Oh, wow. I've never, never experienced that. For like our big flight. Which meant that apparently in LAX there is a separate Delta One lounge. Ooh. I've heard about this. And let me tell you this, right? Never go in there.

Jordan 46:35

Really? Don't do it.

Alban 46:37

For real. I honestly, now I think if you've got kids and if you've never been, if you've never sat in first class, don't ever go there.

Kevin 46:45

Don't ever not because it's terrible, but because it just ruins you from future travel. Yes.

Alban 46:49

Because now you know how the other half lives.

Kevin 46:53

Oh.

Alban 46:53

And we were in there. That's like a cashmere sweater. Never put one on.

Jordan 46:57

Oh, and you took your daughter in there. Oh no.

Alban 47:01

So I have a 10-year-old who now is like, oh, this is, you know, the Delta One's nice because we sat down and there's weight staff. And you just sit down, you're tired, and they're like, oh, do any of you want us to reserve uh a private shower room for you? Uh any of you need to go do that, they bring you drinks and then they're like taking orders. And so they're bringing like real food, like nice restaurant food. And so my 10-year-old's ordering sushi and getting nice sushi made. And you can see it getting made and it brought right over to you. And I'm like, this is the first time this has ever happened to me. This will never happen again. Like someday you're gonna be like backpacking in Europe, like and you'll have $12 total. And I just have no way of expressing don't get used to any of this.

Jordan 47:44

Someday you're gonna be in a bathroom, and the only meal you're gonna get is the food that you want to see. Exactly.

Alban 47:50

Yeah.