How to Add Podcast Transcripts and Quotes to Readwise

At a glance

Quick workflow

Sending podcast quotes to Readwise is a three-part workflow that lives across two tools: transcribe the episode, verify the exact passage against the audio, then move the text into Readwise with one of Readwise’s supported import methods. TranscribeThis handles the first two parts; Readwise handles the import. There is no direct pipe between them, so plan to copy or export the text yourself.

1. Create or obtain a transcript of the episode.
2. Verify the quote and its timestamp against the recording.
3. Export or copy the passages you want, then import them into Readwise.

Step 1 — Create or obtain the transcript

Start with a transcript you have the right to make. Upload the episode audio to the tool at the top of this page, or paste a YouTube link where the podcast is published on YouTube and captions are available. Without an account you can transcribe the first 5 minutes of a file up to 50 MB, which is enough to pull a specific quote.

• Upload the episode file (MP3, M4A, WAV and more) for word-level timestamps.
• Or paste a YouTube link where the show is hosted — that path is caption-based and segment-level, not word-level.
• If the show already publishes an official transcript, use that as your source and skip straight to verifying the quote.

Step 2 — Verify the quote and timestamp

Verify every quote against the audio before it leaves the transcript. AI transcription is a fast first pass, and the errors that matter for a saved highlight — a mis-heard name, a wrong number, a flipped negative — are exactly the ones that survive a quick skim. For uploaded audio, each word carries a timestamp linked to the recording, so you can click into the passage and confirm the wording by ear.

• Play back the sentence you plan to save and confirm it word for word.
• Note the timestamp so you can cite where the quote came from.
• Fix speaker attribution if two people talk over each other — overlap is the hardest case for any model.

Step 3 — Export or copy the text

Once a passage is verified, get it out of TranscribeThis in a form Readwise can accept. For a handful of quotes, select and copy the text directly. For a longer excerpt or a whole verified transcript, export a document and hand that file to Readwise’s importer.

Current Readwise import options

Readwise imports text through its own tools, not through a TranscribeThis connector — so check Readwise’s current documentation before you rely on any single method. As of July 2026, Readwise and its companion app Reader generally accept text in a few ways: pasting or saving a document, sending an article or file to Reader, and manually adding a highlight. Which of these is available to you depends on your Readwise plan and can change, so treat the list below as a starting point rather than a fixed contract.

• Manually add a highlight in Readwise and paste the verified quote plus its source.
• Save the excerpt as a document (e.g. a text or DOCX file) and import it through Readwise’s document/file path.
• Send a longer transcript into Readwise Reader as a document to highlight there, then sync those highlights.

Castro & Apple Podcasts limitations

Castro and Apple Podcasts do not give you a clean, exportable transcript you can push into Readwise. Apple Podcasts shows an in-app transcript for many shows, but it is designed for reading inside the app, not for bulk export, and its availability and copy behavior vary by episode and region. Castro is a listening app without a general transcript-export feature. In both cases the reliable route is the same as any other podcast: get the episode audio (or the show’s YouTube upload) and transcribe that, rather than trying to scrape text out of the listening app.

Create highlights instead of importing everything

Save the highlights that matter, not the entire transcript. Readwise is built around spaced review of a small number of meaningful passages; dumping a full hour-long transcript in buries the two or three ideas you actually wanted to remember and makes review noisy. Pull the specific quotes, add a line of your own context, and keep the source and timestamp so you can return to the original.

• Import 2–5 verified quotes per episode, not the whole file.
• Add a note in your own words next to each highlight.
• Keep the show name, episode, and timestamp as the source.

Copyright and private use

Transcribing a podcast for your own notes and saving short quotes for personal review is very different from republishing an episode’s transcript. Podcasts are copyrighted works; making a personal transcript and keeping a few attributed highlights in your own Readwise account is generally a private, personal-use activity, but posting a full transcript publicly or distributing it can infringe the creator’s rights. When you save a highlight, keep the attribution — show, host, episode, and timestamp — and treat longer excerpts as quotations under fair use with credit, not as content you own.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related resources

Reviewed by the TranscribeThis product team · Last updated: July 2026