How to Transcribe an Interview Recording

To transcribe an interview, upload the recording to Kai The Scribe, tick Label different speakers, and click Start Transcription. The transcript comes back as one paragraph per turn, labelled Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and so on. Swap those labels for real names, then check every quote you plan to use against the audio.

Interviews are the recordings people most want in writing. A journalist needs exact quotes. A researcher needs to code what each participant said. A hiring manager wants to compare candidates side by side. A podcaster wants a guest episode in a form readers can skim. All four jobs start with the same thing: a transcript that shows who said what. This guide covers how to record an interview so it transcribes well, how to run it through the tool, and how to clean up the result into something you can quote from.

Open the transcription tool

Before you record: set the interview up to transcribe well

Most transcript problems are recording problems. A few habits during the interview save more cleanup time than anything you do afterwards.

• Get each voice close to a microphone. In person, put the recorder between you and the guest, nearer the guest. On a call, ask the guest to use headphones so your voice does not echo back through their speakers.
• Pick a quiet room. Cafés, open offices and rooms with a fan running all add noise the model has to work around.
• Let each answer finish. Talking over each other is the hardest thing for any transcription tool to separate. A one second pause before your next question keeps the turns clean.
• Say names and spellings out loud. Ask the guest to say and spell their name, company and any product names at the start. You will need the spellings when you edit.
• Record a short test. Ten seconds of both voices, played back, catches a muted mic before it costs you the interview.

If you need to record people, follow the consent rules that apply where you and they are, and your organization's own policy. Those rules vary by place, so check with the relevant authority or your legal team rather than relying on a general guide.

How to transcribe the interview

There are five steps. The labels below match the tool.

1. Save the recording as a file. The tool accepts MP3, WAV, M4A, MP4, MOV and WEBM. For a video interview, the audio track alone is smaller and uploads faster.
2. Open the tool and sign in with Google. Sign-in keeps your 60 free minutes on one account.
3. Choose the file under Upload File, or paste a link under Media URL. Uploads are capped at 100 MB. If an upload is refused as too large, put the file somewhere public and paste a direct link to it instead.
4. Tick Label different speakers and set the Language. Auto Detect works for most interviews. If the interview is in one language you know in advance, pick it from the menu.
5. Click Start Transcription, then Copy or Download .txt. The summary above the transcript shows the duration and the detected language, so you can confirm it processed the right file.

What the transcript looks like

With Label different speakers ticked, the tool groups the words into turns and starts each one with a label. A two person interview reads like this:

Speaker 1: Thanks for making the time. Can you start with how the project began?

Speaker 2: Sure. It started as a side project in our team, and it grew from there.

The heading above the text says with speaker labels when speaker data came back. The text is punctuated and formatted, but it carries no timestamps. If you leave the box unticked, you get the same words as one block of text with no turns.

Clean up the transcript in three passes

A raw transcript is a draft. Three quick passes turn it into a usable record.

1. Name the speakers. Read the first two turns to work out who Speaker 1 is. Then use find and replace to swap "Speaker 1:" for the interviewer's name and "Speaker 2:" for the guest's. If a third label appears for a few lines, it is usually one of the two voices split in two; merge it by hand.
2. Fix names and terms. Search for the names and product terms you noted at the start and correct the spelling everywhere at once.
3. Verify every quote. Before a line goes into an article, report or show notes, play that part of the recording and confirm the exact words. Machine transcripts slip most often on names, numbers, and moments where two people talk at once.

Turning an interview transcript into something useful

For an article, pull the strongest three or four quotes into a separate document first, then write around them. For research, paste the named transcript into your analysis tool so each code stays tied to the person who said it. For a podcast guest episode, the podcast transcription guide covers turning the text into show notes. For a hiring panel, keep each candidate's transcript in one folder so the panel reads the same answers.

Limits to plan for

• Speakers are numbered, not named. Renaming them is the one manual step you always need.
• No timestamps in the text. The download is plain .txt, not a caption or timecoded file.
• 60 seconds of processing per request. Very long interviews may need to be split into parts.
• Copy before you leave. If the page says the transcript is not saved to your account yet, download the .txt before closing the tab.

Recording quality matters more than any setting. The guide to recording audio for transcription goes deeper on microphones, rooms and file formats.

Frequently asked questions

Transcribe your interview