Transcripts and Show Notes: A Business for Careful Teens

What you actually do

Somebody records an hour of talking. A podcast, a community meeting, a church service, a school panel. You turn it into text that a person can read and search.

The machine does the first pass in about a minute. Then you put your headphones on and go through it, and that is where the work is. Names, street names, local words, anybody with an accent the machine has not heard much of, two people talking over each other, and the place where it confidently wrote a word nobody said.

Show notes are the second half. A short summary, the topics with their timestamps, and the links mentioned. Most small podcasts never do this because it takes an hour they don't have.

What it costs to start

Headphones and somewhere quiet. That's it to begin.

The tools that do the first pass have versions you can start on, and a busier month may need a paid one. Set any account up with a parent, and read what it says about your age before you sign up. Hatchable's ground rules for using AI safely cover this, and reading them with an adult is the first step, not an optional extra.

Your real cost is time. An hour of audio takes about an hour to correct properly when you're new, and closer to thirty minutes once you're quick. Count that before you agree a price.

Find your first customer this month

1. Search for podcasts recorded in your own town or city. There are more than you think, most are made by one person in a spare room, and almost none have transcripts.
2. Do one episode for a show you like and send it over. Not a sample paragraph, a whole finished episode. It shows the standard and it takes you an hour.
3. Ask at community organisations. Councils, historical societies and church groups all record meetings that somebody is supposed to write up, and the person supposed to do it is usually a volunteer who dreads it. Ask a parent to introduce you.
4. Say yes to a rush job once. Turning something around by tomorrow morning when somebody is stuck is what makes you the person they message next time.

What to charge

Price by the hour of audio, not by the hour you spend, or you'll be punished for getting faster.

Around $25 to $40 per hour of recording is a fair place for a young transcriber to start on clear audio with one or two speakers. Ask an adult what they'd expect to pay before you decide, and charge more when there are five speakers, background noise, or a same-day deadline.

Show notes are a separate line. Say $15 on top for a summary, timestamps and links. Sell them together and most people take both.

Say four episodes a month at $30 with notes at $15. That's $180 from one customer who publishes weekly, and podcasts run for years.

Rules and staying safe

Show a parent this list.

• Only take work from people a parent knows about. Tell an adult who the customer is and what the recording contains before you start.
• What is on the recording is private until the owner publishes it. Do not share it, quote it, or tell your friends what was on it.
• Never upload a recording of a private meeting to any AI service without the owner's clear permission, and check what that service says it does with what you send. If you cannot get a straight answer, do the job by ear.
• If a recording contains something that worries you, stop and tell a parent the same day.
• Mark clearly what you could not make out rather than guessing. A guessed word in a transcript is somebody's quote, and they may be held to it.
• Agree the deadline in writing and get paid on delivery, by e-transfer to a parent's account.

What Aisha would do

Aisha is 14 and lives in Ottawa, where half the recordings she'd get have French names in them and a machine will mangle every one. She'd treat that as the reason she's worth hiring rather than an annoyance.

She'd keep a list of the names, streets and local expressions that come up in each show, and check every one before she sent anything back. By the fourth episode her list would be doing most of the work, and she'd be twice as fast as she was in week one.

She'd also send the show notes as plain text the podcaster can paste anywhere, not as a document they have to open and fight with. Small thing, and it's why they'd keep using her.

When it stops being fun

Ninety minutes of four people interrupting each other. A recording made in a cafe. Somebody who wants it back tonight and sent it at nine.

That is the work you are actually being paid for. The clean hour with one speaker is not why anybody needs you. If you can be accurate on the difficult ones and honest about what you couldn't hear, you'll have as much of this as you want.