Research Tools: Automatic Interview Transcription

Hi all, I'm writing this post to share some resources for automatic transcription - very handy for interview data (but probably not conversation analysis). I think this is a topic that has come up in the past, but some of the tools I found recently were new (to me), so I thought to share.

Context: I've done about 30 hours of interviews; interviews were done in either English (My L1, interviewee L2+) or Korean (my L2, interviewee L2). Transcribing the English interviews by hand wasn't terribly slow, but it was tedious. Transcribing the Korean interviews was rough (okay, brutal) - my proficiency and typing speed slowed me down a lot. So I got to searching for additional help.

Where things stand with speech-to-text, you can't expect perfect transcriptions, but you can get fairly decent accuracy when speaker proficiency is high and not strongly accented. These can form a basis for manual clean-up, which is proving to be a lot quicker for me than starting from scratch. Here are a few of the tools I tried:

temi.com - This site only does English, but the accuracy seems quite good (even for non-native speakers). Lots of bells and whistles- there is a very nice interactive transcription editor. The rates are quite cheap, too: 10 cents per minute.

happyscribe.co - This site handles many different languages and has a lot of bells and whistles - automatic punctuation, automatically splitting speaker turns, highlighting parts of transcriptions that the system was less sure of, and really nice integrated playback (you can click a part of the transcript and the audio plays from there). I found the speaker segmentation to be a little off, and the transcription accuracy for this one seems a bit low for Korean (could just be the speakers I fed it). Hourly rates are between 9 and 12 Euro per hour (depending on whether you have a monthly membership).

vocalmatic.com - Handles a fairly wide range of languages, and I found it was decently accurate for Korean. This is pretty no-frills compared to the other options- no automated speaker separation, no punctuation, limited editing tools - but it turns out transcripts with helpful timestamps. I was able to get a lot of mileage out of their free trial (they say you get 30 minutes free, but....). Otherwise, rates are similar to happyscribe.

Other tools to look into are Trint, Transcribe (wreally.transcribe.com). I was focused on tools that offered Korean transcription, but European languages are more common across other platforms.