How to Transcribe Interviews for Research

Qualitative research offers unique feedback, helping you discover problems or opportunities you hadn’t previously considered. When I managed customer support for an online health brand, I can’t tell you how insightful those unprompted customer comments and suggestions were for improving our service.

Collecting qualitative data is tricky and tedious, especially in large volumes. That’s where transcribing research interviews can help.

If you’re curious about how to transcribe interviews for research, read on as I show you the specific steps you can use with Notta to turn your interviews into usable nuggets of data.

Transcribe Interviews for Research With Notta

Human transcription is accurate but costly. If you’re pressed for time and have a limited budget, human transcription might be out of your reach. That’s where automated computer transcription can help.

Computer-transcribed audio is faster and more efficient, though not as accurate if the audio has lots of crosstalk or background noise.

When transcribing interview videos, clearer audio means higher transcription accuracy with tools like Notta. Notta can achieve up to 98.86% accuracy on good-quality audio!

How to Transcribe Interviews for Research with Notta

Step 1: Transcribe Your Interviews

Method 1: Upload Your Interview Videos or Import Them from Drive/Dropbox/Youtube

1. Click the ‘dashboard’ link once you’ve signed into your Notta account.

2.Click ‘Import files’ on the right-hand side of your dashboard page.

3.Drag and drop your interview video file, or select it from your device.

4.Paste your interview video link into ‘import from link’ if it’s stored in Google Drive, YouTube, or Dropbox.

5.Click the ‘upload’ button. Notta will begin processing the video’s audio to create a written transcript. It’s super quick, taking around 10 minutes to transcribe five hours of audio.

Note: The maximum file size you can upload to Notta is 10GB for video. If your video file size is larger, try splitting it up into smaller files using a video trimmer tool like Adobe Express.

Method 2: Live Transcribe the Interview While It's Happening

1. Click the ‘dashboard’ link when you’re signed into Notta.

2. Click ‘transcribe live meeting’. Notta presents you with a window where you can input your meeting details.

3.Paste your meeting invite link from Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Webex into the field provided.

4.Click ‘transcribe now’. This invites Notta Bot to the meeting as a participant to transcribe the speech live.

Transcribe Interview to Text

Notta can simply convert your spoken interviews and conversations into text with 98.86% accuracy. This allows you to review and regain understanding from your interview.

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Step 2: Fix Transcript Errors

1. Click the transcript name under ‘Recent recordings’ in your dashboard to open the transcript.

2. Select the speaker name to add a new name, or choose one from the drop-down list.

3.Delete and retype any words that Notta incorrectly transcribed—you can click any word to play the audio from that point to confirm what it should be.

Alt text: Click any word in your transcript to skip to that audio in the Notta player.

Step 3: Summarize with Notta AI

1. Create an AI-powered summary by clicking the ‘General template’ on the left side of your transcript. You can also choose or make your own summary template in the library.

2.Wait a few moments and Notta AI provides a summary, broken down into three parts:

• Summary: A condensed version of the full transcript

• Chapters: Breaks down the transcript into most important topics

• Action points: A list of next steps to act on, based on the conversation

Step 4: Collaborate with Your Team

1. Click the ‘share’ button to add users from your team and select the permissions for full access, edit, and view modes.

2.Select transcript text to add key points, todo, and project notes, upload images, and share specific passages of text.

Alt text: Add notes and images to the transcript text in Notta.

Step 5:  Share Your Transcript

1. Click ‘share’ to generate a unique, shareable URL.

2. Select one of the social icons to share via WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and more.

3. Add a password or enable search engine indexing with the toggle switches.

FAQs about How to Transcribe an Interview

What Are Common Transcription Methods?

The most common kinds of transcription are:

Verbatim: Transcribes everything including stutters, filler words, slang, and background noises.

Intelligent verbatim: A ‘cleaned up’ version of verbatim, leaving out filler words, stutters, and background noises.

Edited: Grammatically correct sentences, removing all slang and colloquial terms, making it clearer and easier to read.

How Do You Write the Transcript of an Interview?

You’ll need to do a few things to create an accurate transcript of an interview, including:

• Listen to the whole recording

• Identify the names of all speakers and tag them every time they speak

• Include timestamps for each new section of speech

• Write down the questions and answers discussed

Thankfully, an automated tool like Notta captures these details automatically.

How Do You Format a Transcription?

Transcription usually follows these basic formats:

• Timestamps: [00:00]

• Speaker names or labels: [Speaker 1], [John], or [Host]

• [Crosstalk] and [inaudible] tags

• Background sounds or music: [police sirens] or [intro music]

We wrote more about how to write an interview transcript in our blog.

How Do You Analyze Interview Transcripts?

To use interviews as qualitative research data, here are some steps you can follow:

1. Accurately transcribe the interview.

2. Identify key themes, words, and phrases with annotations.

3. Organize these highlighted pieces of data into categories to identify patterns.

4. Align the qualitative data you’ve collected with quantitative data within a spreadsheet.

5. Analyze the data segments to discover themes and help you prioritize the issues you should work on first, according to your findings.

6. Write your results, taking into account the objective of your research, the answers you have found, and the data that supports them.

What Should You Consider When Choosing Transcription Software?

Accuracy: Highly accurate transcription software means fewer mistakes to correct. Aim for 90% accuracy or higher.

Language support: Research participants speak many languages. Transcription software should recognize languages and have the ability to translate.

File formats: To use your transcript in a variety of ways, choose software that exports in formats such as TXT, DOCX, SRT, PDF, or Microsoft Excel formats.

Real-time transcription: For convenience, choose software that transcribes as you talk. You can use this for video interviews as they happen in Google Meet, Teams, and Zoom.

In Summary

Using a tool like Notta, you can simplify those valuable research interviews and condense them into usable data with automated transcripts. Upload interviews you recorded earlier, or transcribe in real-time, so the transcript is ready to use in just a few minutes. No more waiting days for human transcription!

Create your free account and transcribe your first interview.