Transcribe a focus group

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, so a verbatim is checked in the time it takes to hear it.

Editing in the text itself

Rename each label to the participant's code once, fix brand names where they sit, and edit out what identifies a participant before you export.

A research summary

Summarised as user research: pain points in the participants' own terms, what they actually do as distinct from what they say they want, verbatims exactly as said, and requests recorded as requests, not recommendations.

Export

Word (DOCX), TXT, SRT and VTT, on every plan — Word or TXT for your analysis software.

A focus group is the hardest recording a recogniser gets: several people, a room microphone, and participants who agree over each other. Where people speak at once the text needs review, a quiet participant may come back as fragments, and a label can change hands when voices are alike — so check the speaker changes in every passage you will quote, not only the words.

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. In a group that is the brand names, the prices read from the stimulus and the participants' own names, which you will want out of the text anyway.

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.