Manchester United · 2025
Overview
Learn how Tierra supercharged Manchester United's podcast accessibility rating with a custom-built web app — featuring AI transcription, real-time word highlighting, and an interactive experience that exceeded every major podcast platform at the time.
Outcome
A custom podcast player that gave the hard-of-hearing community an industry-leading listening experience — with AI transcription, live word highlighting, host recognition, and a searchable transcript — all automated end-to-end from episode release.
About Manchester United
Manchester United approached Tierra to build a podcast player that would complement the club's commitment to inclusive values — specifically, allowing the hard-of-hearing community to understand and search through the Official Manchester United Podcast. The club has a long history of supporting deaf and hard-of-hearing fans, from hosting the England Deaf Football launch at Old Trafford to becoming one of England's first deaf-friendly football clubs in 2008.
The Challenge
The hard-of-hearing community had no accessible way to engage with the Official Manchester United Podcast — standard players offered only play, pause, and rewind.
Generating accurate podcast transcripts manually would be time-intensive and unscalable as new episodes were released regularly.
No existing podcast platform — including Apple Podcasts or Spotify — had yet publicly launched real-time word highlighting in transcripts.
The club needed an editing suite to correct AI transcription errors, add context between sections, and identify speakers — without relying on Tierra for every update.
How We Helped
Connected to a podcast RSS feed library to detect new episodes automatically. Each episode feeds directly into an AI transcription service, generating a complete transcript with metadata — triggered from release to completion with zero manual intervention.
Built a podcast player that highlights each word in bold as it is spoken — an innovation that Apple Podcasts and Spotify had not yet made publicly available, giving Manchester United a genuine first-mover advantage in accessible podcasting.
Built an internal editing suite for Manchester United's editorial staff — allowing them to correct transcription words, add comments in parentheses, insert non-transcribed context sections between any part of the episode, and apply rich-text formatting.
Trained the AI to recognise hosts by voice pattern, enabling consistent speaker labelling throughout episodes. Built a full-text search feature allowing any listener to find specific keywords, topics, or moments across the entire podcast catalogue.
The Outcome
Accessibility Accreditations Achieved
By automating AI transcripts, Manchester United achieved accessibility accreditations — completing in minutes what human transcribers would have taken hours to produce.
Industry-Leading Experience
The end result exceeded all other podcast players at the time in terms of interactivity and information retrieval — a monumental leap beyond the play/pause/rewind standard.
Hard-of-Hearing Community Engaged
After launch, the hard-of-hearing community greatly appreciated Manchester United's commitment — and the word-highlighting feature was specifically lauded as something that made the content genuinely accessible.
Fully Autonomous Pipeline
The entire process — from episode release to accessible transcript — was automated end-to-end, requiring no ongoing manual effort from the club's team.
