Transcribe Interviews in Minutes, Not Hours

An interview is only useful once it is text: journalists need quotable, verifiable lines, and qualitative researchers need transcripts they can code in NVivo or ATLAS.ti. 1Transcribe turns a recording into exactly that — a clean transcript with automatic speaker labels so you can see who asked each question and who answered, plus timestamps so every quote can be checked against the audio.

Because it runs OpenAI's Whisper, accuracy holds up on the recordings interviews actually produce: accented speakers, phone lines, café background noise, and specialist vocabulary. It works in your browser or in the iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows apps — nothing to install.

Transcribing by hand takes roughly four times real time — a common rule of thumb for an experienced typist. A one-hour interview means about four hours of stop-rewind-type work, and a full day of fieldwork can swallow a week of typing. With 1Transcribe, the same one-hour interview is transcribed in minutes:

Qualitative interview transcription has requirements beyond raw accuracy. 1Transcribe exports to DOCX and TXT, the formats that NVivo, ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA, and Dedoose all import for coding. Speaker diarization keeps interviewer prompts separate from participant responses, so your codes attach to the right voice. Multilingual studies are covered too: Whisper transcribes 99+ languages and can translate speech to English when you need an English working transcript of a foreign-language interview. Long-form formats — oral histories, focus groups, panel discussions — fit in a single file up to 10 hours, and you can batch up to 5 files at once after a day of fieldwork.

Interviews are often the most sensitive files you handle — embargoed reporting, sources who require anonymity, or research participants protected by an ethics board. 1Transcribe is built for that: your files are never used to train AI models, and uploads are automatically deleted after 14 days. That gives journalists a defensible answer for source protection and gives researchers concrete language for IRB and ethics applications about how recordings are processed and retained.