One of the many bits of news from Google I/O 2019[1] was that Google would soon start displaying podcasts in search results. "Soon" turned out to be very soon, as we're already seeing these results surface. Here's one from a search for our own podcast, MozPod:

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While the feature itself is interesting, and the fact that the main result goes to Apple while the episodes go to Google is entertaining, the talk out of I/O suggested something much more intriguing – that Google would soon be indexing podcast content and returning audio clips in search results.

Can Google transcribe audio content?

Is this currently possible? In a word: yes. We know that Google has offered a speech-to-text service[2] as part of Google Cloud Platform since 2017, which has already undergone a few iterations and upgrades. Earlier this year, Android Police spotted source code changes which suggested that Google was proactively transcribing some podcasts[3] on the Google Podcasts platform.

We see evidence of this capability in the broader Google ecosystem. For example, here's an automatic transcript on my Google Pixel phone for a recent call ...

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We even see evidence of this capability in search results, but in a different medium. As early as April 2017, Google was testing suggested clips[4] in YouTube videos. Here's a current example from a search for "how to swim butterfly":

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Note the "Suggested clip" highlighted in the blue box, and starting at the 2:30 mark. What's interesting is that variations on this search not only produce different videos in some cases, but different clips within the same video. Here's the result I got back for "how to swim the butterfly" (adding only

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