Transcribe an oral history interview

In an account — free or Pro, with the same features — the transcript comes with:

Who spoke

In American English, British English and Indian English, the transcript separates the voices into Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and so on; you rename each label once, and the name holds for the whole transcript. In Australian English and Philippine English, it separates them too, on recordings of up to 2 hours. If the separation fails, the transcript comes without speaker labels, and says so.

A time on every word

Click any line to hear that passage; the transcript follows the audio while it plays. A time on a story is how a future reader finds the voice telling it.

Editing in the text itself

Names of people and places, dates, dialect words — fix them where they sit, with the voice playing.

A summary that keeps the quotes

Themes, notable quotes in the speaker's own words — quoted exactly, grammar untidied — and the factual claims a reader might want to check against other sources.

Translation

Translate the transcript for family who do not speak the language it was told in, and read it beside the original.

Export

Word (DOCX), TXT, SRT and VTT, on every plan — Word for the archive copy, TXT for the catalogue.

A digitised cassette carries hiss, a recorder set too close or too far, and a speaker who never spoke for a microphone before; the transcript carries all of it as errors. Every automatic transcript has errors, and they cluster on proper names, numbers and technical terms. Before you quote a passage, click the line and listen: with a time on every word, that check takes seconds. Names of people and places are what an oral history is for, so listen to each before it goes in the archive.

Some archives ask for a literal transcript, with every pause and repetition; an automatic transcript does not promise them — it writes what it hears as words and may drop an “um” or a repeated phrase. Whether the person recorded agreed to the recording being transcribed and kept is yours to settle, as with a typist.

You can also record in the browser, on a phone or a computer. Keep the page open and the screen on until you stop: a browser can end a recording when the page goes into the background.

Without an account, the trial transcribes up to the first 10 minutes of a recording. On Pro, each file can be up to 8 hours, within the month's included hours; what each plan includes, the pricing page shows. See plans and prices.

On long recordings, speaker labels can wander from one section to the next — a consequence of how long audio is processed, not a setting.

Name the main language rather than leaving it on automatic. Automatic detection has to decide what language each stretch of speech is in, and where a recording switches language, what was said in the other one may come back translated instead of transcribed — or not come back at all. Either way nothing is marked as missing: the transcript will look complete.

Philippine English is marked “preview” in the language list: offered, but without a quality commitment yet, so check its transcript more closely before you use it.