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⇠ Podcasting Articles

Profanities/Swearing

Last updated: 23 November 2023

Depending on your audience or syndication partners you may choose to bleep out or silence swearing on your show. It can have a reputational cost if you accidentally leave them in. If you’re OK with swearing left in you still might be required to tag your episode as “Explicit” when uploading to platforms such as Spotify.

Our machine learning matches up speech with a list of words we have in our system and then highlights them. Any detected swear words should be shown as markers in the player at the top of the screen and you can click to hear them right away.

You should bear in mind that this system works based on probability and should not be relied upon entirely without your own proofing or note-taking during recording. There may be profanities or offensive terms that aren’t in our checklist or that weren’t recognised by the algorithm.


Photo courtesy of Guillaume de Germain

Whilst you’re here…

Audio Audit is an automatic benchmarking and proofing tool which checks the quality of your podcast MP3 files, giving you peace of mind before you publish.

It checks things like loudness, silences, restarted sentences, encoding, swearing and metadata.

Learn more ⇢Screenshot of an Audio Audit report

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Creating an account only takes a couple of minutes. You’ll soon be able to start uploading your own audio files and improving your shows.