Business APIs › Automations › Generate show notes and chapters from ea

Generate show notes and chapters from each episode

Podcasts publishing on a schedule. Show notes and chapter markers are the last job before publishing and the one most often skipped.

What you end up with

Chapters with real timestamps, a summary, and quotable pull-lines, produced before the episode goes out.

The flow

TriggerThe master file lands in storage, or the RSS item publishes.
SubmitSubmit the audio URL with word_timestamps.
DeriveChapter boundaries come from topic shifts in the transcript; each gets the timestamp of its first word.
PublishNotes and chapters write back into your host before the episode goes live.

# submit — returns immediately, does not block
curl -X POST https://whipscribe.com/api/v1/transcribe/url \
  -H "X-API-Key: $KEY" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: podcast-to-show-notes-and-chapters-$SOURCE_ID" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com/recording.mp4",
       "diarize":true,
       "word_timestamps":true}'

→ 202 {"job_id":"a1b2…","status":"queued"}

# then poll — a self-serve (Pro) key collects by polling
curl "https://whipscribe.com/api/v1/jobs/$JOB" -H "X-API-Key: $KEY"
→ {"status":"processing"} … {"status":"done"}

Watch for this. Chapter markers must be monotonic and start at 00:00 or players reject the file.

What it costs

Rate$0.008 / min

Per audio hour$0.48

a 3-hour recording$1.44

CreditsNever expire

A weekly 45-minute show is about $1.56 a month. $8 per 1,000 minutes — about $0.48 an audio hour — and credits never expire.

Why this needs an API rather than a person

Publishing is a deadline. A step that needs a human at 11pm is a step that gets skipped.

No subscription to size wrongCompeting transcription tools sell $25–$65 monthly plans with a minute cap that resets whether you used it or not. Credits here are bought once and do not expire, so a quiet month costs nothing and a backlog run does not need an upgrade.

Your audio is not sent to a third-party modelTranscription runs on our own GPUs in our own private cloud. Nothing is forwarded to OpenAI or any other vendor's API, which is usually the blocking question when the recordings are customer calls or unreleased material.

One job, every formattxt, json, srt, vtt and docx all come from the same job id. Re-submitting a file per format is the most common way teams pay several times for one transcription.

Built to be retriedIdempotency-Key means an automation platform's automatic retry returns the original job instead of billing a second one. Every no-code platform retries; most transcription APIs charge you for it.

Build it on

Make.com40s module timeout — submit, store job_id, poll from a second scenariono-code automation n8nWait node works but pins a worker — split submit and poll at volumeself-hosted automation Notionchunk to 2,000 chars/block, 100 blocks per requestdocs + database Amazon S3presigned URLs expire — grant a scoped role for standing pipelinesstorage

Try the quality free, then wire it up

Your first transcript in the web app is free, any length, no card — that is how to check accuracy on your own audio before writing any code. The API itself has no free tier: a key is self-serve once your account has credit ($50 minimum, spendable on transcription, and it does not expire). $8 per 1,000 minutes — about $0.48 an audio hour — and credits never expire.

Transcribe a file free →Create an API key API reference