searchable text-based Best Show podcast

[cutout]

A lot of people have asked "what was the one episode where ______ happened?" Sometimes you can find it at Omar's blog or in the podcast descriptions. But, I'm wondering how possible it would be to use something like MacSpeech to convert the podcast into text that can be posted somewhere as sort of like a postscript to the audio podcast. Anyone have experience with this?

Anyway I guess the first step would be to make sure Tom would be interested in this. In terms of converting friends into Best Show listeners, sometimes it would be nice to quote excerpts from Tom/Jon conversations for people who are reluctant to listen to a 3-hr podcast (convenient for the same reason Best Show Gems is so handy).

[cutout]

Would no one be interested in transcripts? Or is it just more work than I'm imagining?

[yesno]

Text to speech doesn't work all that well in my experience, particularly not when you have multiple speakers.

I bet you could get the entire archive converted by humans for maybe $10,000. Check out Castingwords. I converted about an hour or two for $60, and I think I paid the higher rate.

[senorcorazon]

Or just record the entire show into Google Voice and get the most confused and hilarious interpretation of the show ever.

[ben]

Yeah it might be cost prohibitive.  Starting up a wiki or digital library would be lots cheaper (as in free), and could be broken down by date so people who are interested in helping could at least give an outline and highlights of each show.  Unless something like this already exists, and if it does let me know.  Is Recidivism in shape yet?  That would be my go to source.