How to Transcribe Research Interviews

Qualitative research lives or dies on the quality of its transcripts. Whether you're coding interviews in NVivo or Atlas.ti, quoting participants in a thesis, or just trying to make sense of twelve hours of fieldwork, you need accurate, speaker-attributed, timestamped text you can search and cite.

This is a practical workflow for getting there with ScribeToAny, plus a note on how to cite the tool in your methods section.

What matters in a research transcript

Speaker attribution. You need to know who said what — interviewer vs. participant, or across a focus group.
Timestamps. So you can jump back to the audio to check tone, hesitation or a hard-to-hear passage before you quote it.
Editability. Domain terms, names and acronyms will be misheard by any automatic system. You need to fix them fast.
A clean export. Your analysis tool wants plain text or a structured file, not a locked PDF.

The workflow

Record cleanly. A close mic and a quiet room do more for accuracy than any software setting. Export the recording as wav, mp3 or m4a.
Upload and enable speaker labels. ScribeToAny detects the spoken language automatically (about 98 are supported) and labels each segment by speaker, so a two-person interview reads as a dialogue.
Verify against the audio. In the browser editor, clicking a segment replays that moment — the fastest way to correct a mistranscribed technical term or a participant's name.
Export for your analysis tool. TXT or DOCX for reading and quoting; TSV, CSV or JSON if you want to import segments (with timestamps and speaker column) into a spreadsheet or a script; SRT/VTT if the interview is video.

A word on accuracy: automatic transcription is a first draft, not a finished record. For anything you'll quote or code, verify the passage against the original audio. This is good practice for rigour and for research ethics alike.

Non-English interviews

If you interview in a language other than English, ScribeToAny transcribes in the source language on every plan, including the free one. On the Max plan you can also translate a finished transcript into any of 56 languages segment by segment — useful when you need an English working copy alongside the original-language transcript for your appendix.

Interview data is sensitive. Transcribe only recordings you have consent to process, follow your institution's data-handling and ethics-board requirements, and delete source files you no longer need. Uploaded files are used to produce your transcript, not to train models.

How to cite ScribeToAny

If a transcription tool materially shaped your data, name it in your methods section. A general form:

Interviews were transcribed using ScribeToAny (https://scribetoany.com), an automatic speech-to-text service, and corrected by the author against the original audio.

APA-style reference:

ScribeToAny. (2026). ScribeToAny [Automatic transcription software]. https://scribetoany.com

Adjust to your discipline's style guide; the point is a reproducible statement of what produced the transcript and that a human verified it.

The free plan for a small study

The free plan covers 2 transcriptions a day, 100 minutes a month, and 30 minutes per file, with no credit card — enough for a handful of short interviews or a pilot. For a full study with long sessions, the paid plans raise the per-file and monthly limits.

Start with the interview transcription tool, keep the audio close for verification, and your transcripts will be ready to code rather than ready to redo.