Introducing our most requested feature: Transcriptions!

Today we are excited to announce the release of one of our most requested product features: Transcriptions! Now for every English-language recording on Zencastr, a transcript of the entire conversation is automatically generated and available to be downloaded alongside your individual audio and video files. And even more good news - this feature is available to all users on the professional plan at no additional charge! 

How Does Zencastr Transcribe My Recordings?

Zencastr Transcriptions are produced by our own language modeling AI and proprietary machine learning tools. The Word Error Rate (WER) of our technology is currently comparable to that of transcription industry leaders such as Google, Descript, and Otter.ai. And we only expect the WER to improve in the future!

How Can I Make Use Of Transcriptions For My Podcast?

Many ways! A well-structured transcript can be a powerful SEO tool to help you grow your audience. Providing a transcript for your podcast also enhances its accessibility. Additionally, using a transcript in your editing process can save you time and effort. 

Where Can I Find Transcriptions?

Transcriptions are already built-in to the Zencastr recording process for users on the professional plan. Now, when you create a new episode, you will see an additional field to select the language your podcast will be recorded in. 

When you choose English, a transcription will automatically be generated after you stop recording and will be available for download right from the recording page! Now available in .txt and copy to clipboard in addition to .csv!

Lastly, you can run transcriptions on any past recording! This means you can transcribe all recordings you’ve ever made on Zencastr easily!

What’s Coming Next For Transcriptions?

While transcriptions are only available for English recordings today, we hope to release transcriptions for additional languages in the future. We are also working on updates that will turn your podcast transcripts into a crawl-able and SEO-friendly format. What would you like to see next with our transcription service?

Ready to Try Transcripts?

If you are on a professional plan, just login to your Zencastr account and start recording! Not on a professional plan? Sign up for a 14-day trial to test out how you could put transcriptions to work for your podcast today!

Read more about Transcriptions here!

Introducing Smart Filters: Remove Long Pauses

So What’s New?

At Zencastr we aim to make the podcast creation process simple and accessible so that creators can spend less time editing and producing their content and more time growing and connecting with their audiences.

Remove Long Pauses

We are proud to announce a new suite of tools in our Postproduction feature that make editing easier - Smart Filters! Today we debut the first Smart Filter, Remove Long Pauses, available now to all users! 

Whether you're a podcast producer or edit your own show, Remove Long Pauses will save you a ton of editing time by removing dead air from your podcast automatically based on time criteria you define. Early testing from our team indicates that between 3 to 7 minutes will be edited out of an average 30-minute podcast by removing long pauses, making your content more succinct and impactful and your manual editing less time-consuming and repetitive. It recognizes long periods of ambient noise like phone notifications and keystroke typing as pauses and will remove these too.

Want to learn more? Read how to enable Remove Long Pauses when running a post-production on your podcast recording.

And look out for more announcements from us over the coming weeks as we plan to add more audio and video Smart Filters to further simplify your podcast editing process!

Are you using these podcast growth hacks?

How are other creators promoting their podcasts? We’ve tallied up your votes and growth insights from last week and featured some of the most impactful responses. Check out how your peers are growing their podcasts with this infographic. Click the image to view the full PDF.

Announcing New Podcast Editing Features!

We are excited to announce a podcast editing and post-production update to the platform! The team has released a vastly improved audio and video podcast editing tool to both our Audio and Video post-production systems. The quality and speed with which we can process audio and video mixes have taken significant strides forward, and we’ve added new options in the Video post-production system, detailed below.

New Video Layout Options are Live! Two new video layout options in post-production give you more choices for how you want your podcast to look and also can be used to improve the shareability of your content.

Auto Face Crop - Centered Faces are better!  :) 

Zencastr designed its facial recognition technology specifically for podcasting to pick out participants’ faces in the original videos. Once selected, Auto Face Crop trims the right and left margins so that each participant appears in the middle of the screen. 

Vertical Grid - Perfect for mobile! 📱

The Vertical Grid layout uses your original videos and stacks them vertically. This is perfect for quick video podcast exports. Whether you’re sharing clips from your episodes to social media platforms like Instagram, Tiktok and IGTV, Zencastr’s vertical mix is a perfect way to lay out your content.

Standard Grid - Standard video display with updated post production magic! 🎥

Standard Grid, the original video format, now can be used with more participants. It keeps videos as originally recorded and places them side-by-side in a horizontal orientation for up to 6 total participants. Standard Grid layout is perfect for Youtube and other video viewing platforms. 

Reminder: You need to use Zencastr post production to get access to these features! 

We can’t thank you enough for choosing to use our platform and we look forward to delivering many more user-focused content solutions over the coming months!

Announcing New Recording Modes

You asked for it and we have heard you. As of yesterday, all Zencastr users now have the option to toggle into their preferred podcasting mode before recording their episode. We want Zencastr to be a first class experience for video and audio-only podcasts alike.  This feature was built for those who aren’t yet ready to start recording video or those who simply want to view their guests but record audio-only.  To our long-time creators, thank you for all your feedback as we love to listen and are committed to continually building to solve the pain points our creators face. 

You can check it out by creating a new episode from your Zencastr dashboard! 

 Still, have questions? Our fabulous support team put together this document to walk you through the product changes with video examples

We can’t thank you enough for choosing to use our platform and we are excited to deliver many more user-focused content solutions over the coming months. 

Zencastr Raises a $4.6M Seed Round To Help Podcasters Build Stronger Communities

Podcast Creation Company Rolls Out Video Feature, Sees Its Future Tied To Enhancing Creator and Audience Connections

February 16, 2021 – Zencastr, the leading high-end cloud-based podcasting platform, has announced its first-ever round of funding, led by Utah-based venture firm Kickstart. Zencastr has long been profitable, but the $4.6 million seed round will set the stage for the forward-leaning tech company’s next evolution of growth. Zencastr will leverage the infusion of capital to move its game-changing video podcasting offering into open beta. The round will also allow the company to focus on bringing the podcast creation process to a much wider audience of users – a mission central to the original vision of the founders and particularly valuable at this time.

Zencastr was founded in 2015 by tech entrepreneur Josh Nielsen as a way to put the power of creating interest-based communities in the hands of anyone with a message and a desire to be heard. Today, Zencastr facilitates hundreds of thousands of hours of recorded content every month and services roughly 6% of all podcasts. The company’s vision has always been to make the technology seamless but the results pristine. From this vision was born the platform that allows creators and guests with zero production background and simple technology to log in from wherever they are and seamlessly create studio-quality content. This seed round of funding will allow the company to even more fully realize that vision.

With a background as an engineer for video sharing companies Flipagram and ByteDance (owner of TikTok), Co-Founder and CPO Adrian Lopez has a strong feeling for the power of podcasting to connect people. “As a listener, the intimacy you feel as you get to know a podcaster is one of the greatest forms of connection in media today. We see podcasting as a medium for fostering understanding and discourse and we want to remove all barriers preventing listeners and creators from connecting through podcasts.”

While the company has set the standard for podcasting content creation since 2015, Zencastr’s video offering, which moved into an open beta stage on February 16th, in many ways represents that vision’s fullest realization. The open beta strives to put the power of studio-quality, remote video production into the hands of anyone with a story to tell. Features will include HD Video Recording, Studio-Quality Sound, Built-in VoIP, Chat and Footnotes, Live Soundboard Editing, Automatic Postproduction, and Secured Cloud Backup - all running right from a user’s browser so they can record from anywhere, without ever installing anything.

Important to the founders will be the multi-tiered offering levels, to ensure that there is a use case for everyone with an interest. At the beginning of COVID-19, Zencastr lifted restrictions on its free plans and is delighted to continue to offer those benefits to its creators. Co-Founder and CEO, Josh Nielsen notes, “We are overjoyed to launch our video podcasting tool out of private beta. Thank you to the 40k users who patiently waited and then tested in private beta, our team for their brilliant work commitment to delivering this first in class product. At a time when the world feels as far apart as ever, we’re working to bridge that divide.” 

In describing the fit between the company and lead investor, Kickstart, Nielsen adds, “Zencastr is a fully distributed team that has no office anywhere, this opened up great opportunities to partner with the right venture firm that might not be situated in traditional centers of tech power. We found Kickstart out of Salt Lake City, Utah to be the best fit for our mission. They are founder-friendly, have a deep passion for the podcasting space, and believe strongly in our vision for the platform.” 

Echoing this sentiment, Kickstart Managing Partner, Gavin Christensen offers, “In an age of social isolation, the world's communities have become separated. Our stadiums, offices, and schools are now more remote than ever. Podcasting has always been about fostering a deep connection at scale. Anyone in the world can download podcast audio and start an intimate relationship with its creator. We think there has never been a better time to amplify this medium to help the world connect via podcasting and we are thrilled to support Zencastr in their efforts to do so.”

Private investors in this round also include former Flipagram (acquired by ByteDance/TikTok) executives, Brian Dilley and Farhad Mohit. Dilley explains, “In Zencastr, I see so many similarities to the early days of video creation and social media networks like Flipagram, TikTok, and Instagram – a technology-enabled product, pushing the limits of digital creation. Zencastr is truly leading the wave by taking podcasting and video creation to the next level.” 

Investors also participating in the seed are audio industry veteran, Jeremy Andrus, the former CEO of Skullcandy, as well as serial technology leaders Austen Allred, founder of the Lambda school, Aaron Skonnard, founder of Pluralsight, and Karl Sun from Lucid along with his executive team. 

To learn more about the history of Zencastr, tune into the Digital Nomad podcast, featuring the Zencastr founders and team, describing how we got here, and where we’re headed. 

ABOUT ZENCASTR 
Zencastr is a modern web-based solution for high-quality audio and video podcast production. With a full suite of professional tools, Zencastr allows podcasters to quickly and seamlessly record their guests remotely and produce their podcasts in studio quality.

Zencastr is launching video recording into “Open Beta”

Zencastr has always been focused on helping podcasters create amazing content. Since 2015 we have enabled thousands of voices to create and record millions of hours of studio quality audio. However, pristine audio is only a means to an end for podcasters. Podcasters' true goal is to connect with and inspire individuals around the world. To that end, Zencastr is more than just a high quality recording tool. What drives us is ensuring content creation is so easy and simple that creators can focus on what matters most - growing and connecting with their audience.  

The launch of our new open beta platform is the next step in helping creators express their compelling, unique, and vibrant voices to as many people as possible. 

Remote HD video recording bolsters the high quality audio Zencastr has been providing to creators over the last six years. Remote HD video is only the first of many great products we have planned to help streamline your workflow, build your community, and monetize the efforts of podcasters around the world. In order to accelerate the creation of products that properly live up to the needs and expectations of our creators, we have decided to raise a round of funding.  This capital support will allow us to move fast and build the ultimate podcast creator platform.

We believe strongly in the power that podcasting has to bring people together and we are happy to be a part of building the future of podcasting alongside our creators. Here are some of the new changes happening on the platform as of today:

Video beta now open to all users

While the video recording feature is still technically in beta status, it is now accessible to all Zencastr creators at zencastr.com.  You will still have access to the same high quality audio recording tools with the additional option to view your guests live and record HD 1080p video. We heard your love for the classic audio-only Zencastr and we are working on an integrated audio-only solution for zencastr.com. For the time being, you can also access the classic audio-only experience at classic.zencastr.com.

Improved audio recording experience

In addition to enabling video, we have made many improvements to the audio recording experience. We are upgrading our audio sample rate from 44.1k to a higher quality 48k 16-bit WAV. Additionally, all files are uploaded as the recording takes place. This means that your guests won’t need to wait around for WAV uploads to complete one you stop the recording. This used to take a few minutes and now the average upload is complete in just 4 seconds!

Rebrand and UI upgrade

You will also notice that we are updating our brand and design to match the great new features.  Now you and your guests can enjoy a more professional experience on Zencastr.

Extended pro trial

We know that video podcasting will be new to many of you. We want everyone to have the chance to try out video podcasting, so we are extending the Professional plan trials to six weeks. Also, any Hobbyist user can start a new Professional plan trial, even if they have been on a trial before. You can start a new trial at https://zencastr.com/pricing.

Moving away from Firefox, adding Brave and Edge support

Our latest updates to support professional quality audio and video are not supported by Firefox yet. Our team worked tirelessly to try and support Firefox, but we found that many of the APIs that we needed to make the highest quality audio and video in the most secure way possible are not currently supported by Firefox. We hope to revisit Firefox support once they offer a more robust media recording feature set.  

We know that Firefox is popular for many users due to their focus on user privacy.  User privacy is of utmost importance to Zencastr and our engineers have strived to make Zencastr work on a browser that is both focused on user privacy and has first class support for the recording APIs we need to make your recordings high quality and secure. The co-founder of Firefox has a new privacy focused browser called Brave which we are now glad to announce support for on Zencastr.  Additionally, we now support Microsoft’s Edge browser for greater accessibility for Windows users.

Free plans continue to have extended limits due to COVID-19

Since COVID-19 continues to force us into isolation, we are keeping our recording time and participant limits lifted for Hobbyist users. Connecting with others is more crucial than ever and we are honored to facilitate those conversations.

A thank you to beta testers

Thank you to all of the 40k+ creators who signed up to test this latest version of Zencastr while it was still in beta.  Your help has been invaluable as we have worked with you to ensure that our recording products meet professional standards.  As a thank you for your support and patience, we have credited all users who were in the waitlist with 2 free postproduction credit hours.

This release has been a long time in the making and we can’t wait to see what you create on Zencastr!  

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us at support@zencastr.com or leave a comment below.

Josh & Adrian, Co-Founders

Rebranding Zencastr

Zencastr started off as a small passion project but it has now grown into the largest podcast creation platform.  Many of the largest brands and influencers in the world record regularly with Zencastr, and yet, we’re still using the same brand I created back when Zencastr was a one-man team based in the jungle in Thailand.  It’s time that Zencastr got the visual experience that our amazing creators deserve.

This isn’t just a visual re-skin.  We have gathered years of feedback helping successful podcast creators.  We’re now combining those years of experience into a product that is delightful to use for you and your guests.

“This isn’t just a visual re-skin. We have worked with successful podcast creators to gather years of feedback and now we’re combining all that UX/UI research into a product that is intuitive and delightful to use for you and your guests.”

As you may have noticed.  We are rolling out this new look, design language and interface in stages starting with our private video beta.  Sign up for the private video beta to get early access to the next version of Zencastr including our new vidcasting platform and the redesign.

Below is a quick video walkthrough of the brand re-imagination process.  We explored a lot of ideas before we found the new brand we love.  Check it out!

If you’re as excited about this as I am, don’t hesitate to give some love to my co-founder, chief product officer Adrian Lopez and our amazing lead designer Valeo Mooha.  They worked a lot of long nights to bring our new brand to life.

Please follow us on social media….

Instagram: @zencastr
Twitter: @zencastr