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Free Interview Transcription

Interview Transcription

Hand over the recording of an interview and the exchange comes back as text, every question paired with the answer it drew and every speaker named.

  • Questions and answers kept together
  • Each speaker named and separated
  • Wording left exactly as spoken
  • Every passage placed inside the hour
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What Interview Transcription Preserves

Two voices, in order, with the pairing intact.

A transcript of a conversation is not a transcript of a speech. What matters is which answer followed which question, because an answer lifted away from its question can be made to mean almost anything. Interview transcription keeps the two locked together, so a quotation arrives with the thing it was replying to. The audio goes in and text comes out, with speakers separated throughout. Nothing is summarised on the way through, because the point of the exercise is the original wording.

What Interview Transcription Handles

Properties that decide whether the finished text is usable in practice.

Keep the pairing intact

Every answer sits directly beneath the question it was given in response to, in the order the two were spoken.

Name every voice

Interviewers and interviewees are separated through the recording, and the labels can be renamed to match real names.

Quote without guessing

Because interview transcription keeps the wording as spoken, a sentence between quotation marks is the sentence that was said.

Place each passage

Time markers let a disputed line be replayed rather than argued about from anybody's recollection.

Take the formats people record in

Phone memos, handheld recorders, video calls and shared drives are all ordinary starting points for interview transcription, without a conversion step.

Stay editable afterwards

Names, terminology and sections a participant asked to drop can all be changed in the text.

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An answer means little without its question

Cut an answer loose from what prompted it and the meaning shifts. A short reply can read as agreement or as sarcasm depending on the question that came before, and a reader with only half the exchange has no way to tell. Interview transcription keeps the pairs in place, which separates a usable record from a pile of unattached lines. Proximity is the whole point.
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A question above its answer
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A quotation cannot be polished later

Between quotation marks the words have to be the words. Rewriting an awkward sentence into a smoother one turns a source into an interpretation, and the habit is easy to fall into when the only version available is a rough note taken in the room. Interview transcription takes the words from the recording, which removes the temptation entirely.
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A quote kept word for word
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A dozen interviews only become a study in text

Patterns do not appear in audio. Finding the four participants who described the same problem means being able to search a word across every conversation, and being able to read a reply twice without playing it again. Interview transcription is what turns a stack of recordings into something that can be compared rather than merely collected, which is where a study actually begins.
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Twelve conversations compared as text
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People take the long way to a point

Interviewees warm up, qualify, double back and answer something adjacent to what was asked. Deciding which of those turns is the real answer is an editorial judgement, and software has no business making it. Interview transcription writes the whole route down and lets the person who was there choose the part worth quoting, rather than a machine deciding on their behalf.
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A winding answer written out whole
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Writing while listening costs the room

Note-taking during a conversation takes attention away from the person being interviewed, and the parts missed tend to be the pauses and the follow-ups that a note-taker was too busy to catch. Getting the words afterwards means the hour can be spent listening, and interview transcription can wait until the room is empty.
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A recorder left running, no notes
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An interview belongs to the person who gave it

Participants sometimes ask for a passage to be dropped, or for a name to be spelled differently from how it sounded. Those requests are far easier to honour when the conversation exists as text, because the change can be made in one place and the rest of the interview transcription stays exactly where it was.
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A passage removed at a request

How to Use Interview Transcription

Three steps, none of them taken during the conversation.

Step 1

Hand over the recording

Upload the file the recorder produced, in whatever format it happened to use, without converting it first.

Step 2

Let the conversation be written

Both sides are written down in sequence, so a question is never left without its answer.

Step 3

Work with the text

Copy the passages you need, correct the names of the people involved, or store the whole exchange as a permanent record.

Who Uses Interview Transcription

Four settings where attribution had to be exact.

CF

Claire Fontaine

Staff Writer

A profile is built on four or five sentences chosen from ninety minutes of talk. Interview transcription means I can find the sentence again and check I have not bent it.

OH

Omar Haddad

UX Researcher

Sixteen user interviews produce a hundred pages and about six findings. Coding them by hand is only possible because the answers are text I can tag and count.

BM

Bianca Moretti

Technical Recruiter

Hiring panels forget which candidate said what within a day. The interview transcription settles it, and it does so before anybody has had a chance to form a favourite.

SB

Samuel Boateng

Oral Historian

Our archive holds conversations with people who are no longer alive to be asked again. Every word matters, and nothing may be paraphrased for the sake of readability.

Questions About Interview Transcription

What the text keeps, what it leaves alone and who owns it.

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Give it the recording and what follows is text, both sides labelled, ready to quote, code or file away.

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Interview Transcription

The Exchange, Written Down

An interview is a record of two people thinking in public, and the writing down is what lets the result be quoted fairly.