Is there a standard for including a transcript in an audio podcast RSS feed?

Question

I am programmatically generating an RSS feed for an audio podcast. I have transcripts in the form of subtitle (SRT) files for each audio file.

Is there a standard or norm, de-facto or de-jure, for adding transcript or lyrics files to the feed?

rss
 +- channel
 |   +- item
 |   |   +- enclosure

Answer 1

"Standard" is a relative term, but there is some consolidation around the "RSS Namespace Extension for Podcasting" extension to RSS (https://podcastindex.org/namespace/1.0).

As long as you have xmlns:podcast="https://podcastindex.org/namespace/1.0" in your root rss tag, you can use the podcast:transcript element under item.

rss
 +- channel
 |   +- item
 |   |   +- podcast:transcript

It has a url attribute which should be the fully qualified URL to the transcript file, and can specify a type attribute to indicate whether it is text, HTML, JSON or SubRip format.

See https://podcastindex.org/namespace/1.0#transcript for more information.