Interview Transcription

Transcribe an interview to text

Journalists, qualitative researchers, recruiters and oral history projects all end up with the same artefact: two people talking for forty minutes, and a need to find one sentence in it three weeks later.

MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, OGG, MP4 · up to 20 MB as a guest

Transcribing your audio…

What makes interview recordings hard

Interviews are two-voice recordings where one voice is usually much closer to the microphone than the other. The interviewer, sitting behind the recorder, often transcribes worse than the subject — which is backwards from what you need, since the questions give the answers their context.

A workflow that holds up

1

Record with the microphone closer to your subject than to yourself.

2

Upload the whole session rather than splitting it — context across the full conversation improves accuracy.

3

Work from the timestamped transcript so you can jump back to the audio for any quote.

4

Verify every direct quote against the recording before publishing it.

Things worth knowing first

  • Ask your subject to say their name and title at the start; it gives you a clean reference for spelling.
  • Overlapping speech is the biggest accuracy cost in interviews — a moment of turn-taking discipline pays off later.
  • For multilingual interviews, select the dominant language rather than auto-detect.

What you get back

Every job returns both versions. Take whichever fits the job.

Clean transcript for reading and editing
Thanks everyone for joining. Let's start with last month's numbers. I'll share my screen so you can follow along. The headline is that renewals came in ahead of forecast for the third quarter running.
Timestamped for subtitles and citation
[00:00 → 00:04] Thanks everyone for joining.
[00:04 → 00:09] Let's start with last month's numbers.
[00:09 → 00:14] I'll share my screen so you can follow along.

An illustration of the two output formats. Not the result of any particular recording.

Questions about interview transcription

No, transcripts are continuous with timestamps rather than speaker-labelled. In a two-person interview, turn changes are usually obvious from content.
Up to 30 minutes per file on the free plan, 90 on Pro. Longer sessions should be split at a natural break.
Verify against the audio first. Transcription is accurate enough to work from but not accurate enough to publish unchecked.

Other things people transcribe

Recording in a language other than English? See our language-by-language guides →

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