This American Life Podcast Transcripts

Name: This American Life Podcast Transcripts
Author: Mao et al. (academic)

by Mao et al. (academic)

Long-form podcast ASR + speaker-role corpus.

TL;DR

Long-form podcast ASR + speaker-role corpus.

Best for long-form podcast ASR + speaker-role classification (host/guest/caller). Pricing: research-only.

What it is

TAL Corpus aligns This American Life podcast episodes with their official transcripts. Researchers fetch audio + alignments locally; transcripts are not redistributed. Research-only.

Best for: Long-form podcast ASR + speaker-role classification (host/guest/caller).
Watch out for: Transcripts copyrighted (This American Life) · pipeline only for research use · audio downloads via podcast feed. Cite: Mao et al., ASRU 2019.

Install / use

git clone https://github.com/zaidalyafeai/tal-corpus  # alignment scripts

Features

Speaker diarization	Yes
Word-level timestamps	No
Streaming / real-time	No
Languages supported	1
HIPAA eligible	No

This American Life Podcast Transcripts vs Whipscribe

Feature	This American Life Podcast Transcripts	Whipscribe
Category	Open source	Transcription APIs
Pricing	research-only	free beta
Speaker diarization	Yes	Yes
Word timestamps	No	Yes
Streaming	No	No
Languages	1	99
Platforms	GitHub	Web, API, MCP

Alternatives to This American Life Podcast Transcripts

OpenAI Whisper

OpenAI

The reference open-source multilingual ASR model from OpenAI.

OSS · MIT ★ 98.1k

whisper.cpp

Georgi Gerganov

C/C++ port of Whisper — runs on anything, from a Raspberry Pi to Apple Silicon.

OSS · MIT ★ 48.8k

faster-whisper

SYSTRAN

4× faster than reference Whisper using CTranslate2 — production sweet spot.

OSS · MIT ★ 22.3k

Whipscribe is a managed faster-whisper + whisperX service. If you want transcripts without running infrastructure, paste a URL or drop a file in the form below — you'll have a transcript in seconds.