Transcripts

Diarized dialogue, word-level timestamps, entity mentions in context, and SRT export.

Every transcribed episode has three transcript views, each tuned for a different use case:

• Dialogue — speaker-attributed lines with sentence-level timestamps. The default. Best for chat-style UIs, LLM context windows, and most reading.
• Words — every word individually timestamped. Best for karaoke-style highlighting, precision audio editing, and word-aligned search.
• Mentions — lines surrounding mentions of a specific entity, with is_mention flags. Best for “what did they say about X?” workflows.

Dialogue transcripts are also reachable scoped to a single segment or clip.

Available to MCP agents via particle_podcast_get_episode with include: ["transcript"] (and optional transcript_format, transcript_speaker, transcript_start, transcript_end). For mention-style windows, use particle_podcast_find_mentions.

Dialogue transcript

curl

curl "https://api.particle.pro/v1/podcasts/episodes/78cgekLUjCJBUZbj3s5K8Y/transcript" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $PARTICLE_API_KEY"

Response (truncated)

{
  "episode_id": "78cgekLUjCJBUZbj3s5K8Y",
  "language": "en",
  "duration_seconds": 4206,
  "lines": [
    {
      "number": 1,
      "speaker": "Scott Galloway",
      "role": "CO_HOST",
      "start_seconds": 0.56,
      "end_seconds": 7.74,
      "text": "This episode is brought to you by The Build Podcast…"
    }
    // …
  ]
}

Lines are ordered, 1-indexed, and include speaker name and role. Note that the first lines of many episodes are sponsorship reads — fetch /segments to see which time ranges are tagged AD if you want to skip them. See segments.

Output formats

Use the format query parameter:

Dialogue (default)

Structured JSON with speaker attribution, roles, and timestamps per line.

curl ".../transcript?format=dialogue"

Best for: building conversation UIs, speaker analysis, programmatic processing.

Plain text

Speaker: text lines, one per turn.

curl ".../transcript?format=text"

Best for: LLM context windows, full-text display, search indexing.

SRT subtitles

Standard SubRip format with speaker labels.

curl ".../transcript?format=srt"

Best for: video players, caption rendering, accessibility tools.

Filter by speaker or time range

Extract everything one person said:

curl ".../transcript?speaker=Kara+Swisher" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $PARTICLE_API_KEY"

Extract a time range:

# Minute 5 to minute 15
curl ".../transcript?start=300&end=900" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $PARTICLE_API_KEY"

Combine — exactly what one person said during one segment:

curl ".../transcript?speaker=Scott+Galloway&start=1435&end=2228&format=text"

Word-level transcript

For per-word timing — karaoke-style highlighting, precision editing, word-aligned search:

curl "https://api.particle.pro/v1/podcasts/episodes/78cgekLUjCJBUZbj3s5K8Y/transcript/words?start=0&end=10" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $PARTICLE_API_KEY"

Response (truncated)

{
  "episode_id": "78cgekLUjCJBUZbj3s5K8Y",
  "language": "en",
  "words": [
    { "text": "This", "type": "word", "start_seconds": 0.56, "end_seconds": 0.74, "speaker": "Scott Galloway" },
    { "text": " ",    "type": "spacing", "start_seconds": 0.74, "end_seconds": 0.82, "speaker": "Scott Galloway" },
    { "text": "episode", "type": "word", "start_seconds": 0.82, "end_seconds": 1.12, "speaker": "Scott Galloway" }
    // …
  ],
  "has_more": false
}

Word-level transcripts for long episodes can be very large — a feature-length episode runs to tens of thousands of entries. Pass start and end to clip a time range, limit to bound the page size, and exclude_spacing=true if you don’t need the inter-word whitespace tokens.

Query parameters

Param	Default	Description
start	0	Start time in seconds for time-range clipping.
end	end of episode	End time in seconds for time-range clipping.
limit	unset (return all)	Max words per page (1–5000). Omit to return every matching word.
cursor	—	Opaque cursor from a previous cursor response field.
exclude_spacing	false	Drop type:"spacing" tokens. See below.

Spacing tokens

Roughly half of the entries in a typical word transcript have type:"spacing" and text:" " — these represent the silence between spoken words, with their own start_seconds/end_seconds. They’re useful when timing matters: caption/subtitle UIs that need precise pause durations, karaoke-style word highlighting against playback, or reconstructing inter-word silences for audio alignment. NLP, search, and LLM consumers should pass exclude_spacing=true to skip them — it roughly halves the payload.

Pagination

When you pass limit, the response includes a cursor and has_more: true until the last page:

# First page
curl ".../transcript/words?limit=1000&exclude_spacing=true" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $PARTICLE_API_KEY"

# Next page — paste the cursor from the prior response
curl ".../transcript/words?limit=1000&exclude_spacing=true&cursor=r.AbCdEf" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $PARTICLE_API_KEY"

The speaker field is the identified speaker name (e.g. Scott Galloway). When a speaker hasn’t been resolved to a name, the raw STT label (speaker_0, speaker_1, …) is returned instead.

Transcript mentions

The most useful transcript view when you care about a specific person, company, or topic. Returns the dialogue lines around every mention of an entity in one episode, with is_mention: true on the lines that actually contain the mention and surrounding lines for context.

curl

curl "https://api.particle.pro/v1/podcasts/episodes/78cgekLUjCJBUZbj3s5K8Y/transcript/mentions?entity_id=sam-altman" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $PARTICLE_API_KEY"

Response (truncated)

{
  "episode_id": "78cgekLUjCJBUZbj3s5K8Y",
  "entities": [
    {
      "entity": {
        "id": "5MBAHcKUujL2dzPXrgfQ8E",
        "slug": "sam-altman",
        "name": "Sam Altman"
      },
      "total_mention_count": 5,
      "mention_variants": ["Sam Altman"],
      "mentions": [
        {
          "lines": [
            { "number": 363, "speaker": "Kara Swisher", "text": "Uh, let's go on a quick break.", "is_mention": false, "start_seconds": 1232.53, "end_seconds": 1233.69 },
            { "number": 364, "speaker": "Kara Swisher", "text": "When we come back, Elon Musk and Sam Altman head to court.", "is_mention": true, "start_seconds": 1233.79, "end_seconds": 1236.51 },
            { "number": 365, "speaker": "Kara Swisher", "text": "Big story, actually.", "is_mention": false, "start_seconds": 1236.65, "end_seconds": 1238.09 }
          ],
          "start_seconds": 1231.47,
          "end_seconds": 1246.56
        }
        // …
      ]
    }
  ],
  "has_more": true,
  "cursor": "r.AQAAABk"
}

Use start_seconds / end_seconds to deep-link into the audio, or feed the line text into an LLM with full speaker context.

Chunking semantics

The endpoint groups transcript lines into context windows:

• context_lines (default 2, max 20) is the radius of each window. A mention on line i produces the closed range [i - context_lines, i + context_lines], clamped at the transcript boundaries — so a single mention yields up to 2 * context_lines + 1 lines.
• Adjacent or overlapping windows merge into a single window. Two mentions within context_lines of each other produce one entry with multiple is_mention: true lines, not two entries.
• total_mention_count is the unfiltered count of dialogue lines containing at least one mention of the entity in the episode. It is independent of pagination, and equals the sum of is_mention=true flags across the un-paginated mentions[].
• Mention matching is a case-sensitive substring match against mention_variants (the entity’s canonical name plus any annotated aliases).

Pagination

Caller shape	Pagination axis	Cursor refers to
entity_id provided	mentions[] (windows)	offset into windows for that entity
entity_id omitted	entities[]	offset into entity list

When entity_id is set, exactly one entity is returned and its mentions[] is paged. When entity_id is omitted, each entity in the page returns all of its mentions; deep-paging through a single entity’s mentions requires re-issuing with that entity_id.

limit defaults to 25 and is capped at 100. Pass the cursor from a previous response to fetch the next page; has_more indicates whether more results exist.

curl "https://api.particle.pro/v1/podcasts/episodes/78cgekLUjCJBUZbj3s5K8Y/transcript/mentions?entity_id=sam-altman&limit=25&cursor=r.AQAAABk" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $PARTICLE_API_KEY"

Segment and clip transcripts

Segments and clips have their own transcript endpoints scoped to that time range:

# Segment transcript
curl "https://api.particle.pro/v1/podcasts/segments/{segment_id}/transcript" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $PARTICLE_API_KEY"

# Clip transcript with SRT export
curl "https://api.particle.pro/v1/podcasts/clips/{clip_id}/transcript?format=srt" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $PARTICLE_API_KEY"

Both accept the format query parameter (dialogue, text, or srt).

Related

• Episodes — discovery and sub-resources
• Segments & clips — get a clip ID, then its transcript
• Knowledge graph → entities — pick the entity to mention-search