Hear Any Podcast Episode in Your Language, for About a Dollar

The episode you can’t quite follow

Some of the best podcast episodes just happen to be in a language you don’t fully speak — a great interview in German, a niche history show in French, a friend’s recommendation that turns out to be in Spanish. You can hear it. You just can’t quite follow it.

own.audio is adding a simple option for that: pick an episode, pick a language, and get a translated, narrated version added straight to your library.

Think of a parent who wants their kids to hear a great science podcast, but the kids’ English isn’t there yet. Or someone who moved countries and lost touch with shows that never got a local version. None of these people need a perfect translation — they need a translation, today, without asking a production studio for one.

How it actually works

The catch, and it’s a deliberate one: it only works on episodes that publish a transcript. A growing number of shows already do, using the <podcast:transcript> tag that’s part of the Podcasting 2.0 standard. We read that transcript, translate it, and have it narrated by an AI voice.

We didn’t want to build this on speech-to-text, guessing at what was said from the audio itself. Guessing compounds — a mis-heard word becomes a mistranslated sentence becomes a narrated line that’s just wrong, with nothing pointing back at the mistake. Requiring a real transcript means the input is always something the podcast’s own creators published and stand behind.

What it isn’t

It’s not a dub. One AI voice reads the entire episode in the new language — a host, a guest, a narrator, all in the same voice. Tone, pauses, the way someone’s voice changes when they’re excited or uncomfortable — that’s the original speaker’s, and it doesn’t survive translation. Names and niche jargon occasionally come out wrong.

It’s also for your household, not something you send to a group chat. The translation stays in your family’s library — you and everyone in your family can listen to it, but it isn’t a way to redistribute someone else’s show to the world. And it only works where a transcript exists, so it’s not every episode of every show — plenty of podcasts, especially smaller ones, don’t publish one yet.

We’re calling this an 80% solution on purpose. It won’t replace a professional dub, and it doesn’t try to. But if the alternative is not understanding the episode at all, 80% is a very good deal — and it’s fast. In our own test, a real 9-minute episode was translated, narrated, and ready to play in 93 seconds, start to finish.

What it costs, and why

Pricing is per episode, shown up front before you pay — no subscription, no per-show fee. It’s based on how much there actually is to translate and narrate: more spoken words costs more, a short clip costs less.

In our own testing, the German translation shown in this post — 8,570 characters of transcript — cost 90 cents. You pay once; replaying the translation afterward is free.

Picking up where you left off

A translated episode isn’t a one-off file that disappears into a folder — it sits in your library like anything else you’re partway through. Stop listening on the drive home, and it’s waiting in Continue Listening next time you open the app, at the exact second you left it, the same as a regular episode or an audiobook chapter. Since the translation belongs to your household rather than just whoever requested it, anyone in the family can pick it up from there too.

Voice selection is deliberately simple right now: one male and one female named voice per language, rather than a big catalog to browse. Enough to pick the one that sounds right to you, not so many that choosing one becomes its own decision.

Try it first

It’s still in development, alongside the rest of own.audio. If you want to be among the first to try it, register on the front page — we’ll let you know the moment it’s ready.