Transcription App for Qualitative Research

Committees decide case by case, but local processing makes the transcription step easy to justify: recordings are processed on your computer, stored where you choose and never shared with a third party, so there is no data transfer to describe and no external processor to name. Describe this workflow in your application, along with how recordings are stored and when they will be destroyed, and follow your institution’s data management plan.

Yes. Speaker segmentation splits the recording into turns, and you can tune its precision for a lively group discussion rather than a quiet one-to-one. Label a few segments per participant, ideally three or more, and Speaker Recognition labels the rest. Any segment can be reassigned in one click, and renaming a participant updates every segment at once. Heavy overlapping speech is hard for any system, so expect to tidy up a few turns by hand.

Whisper models tend to smooth out hesitations, repetitions and false starts, which suits thematic analysis but not approaches that treat the grain of talk as data, such as conversation analysis. If your analysis needs a strict verbatim convention, plan a review pass in the editor, where the audio for every line is one click away, word-level timestamps are available and the waveform shows you the pauses.

Yes. Export transcripts as Word or plain text files, which these packages import. Exporting from Text view gives you clean paragraphs grouped by speaker, the layout they handle best. If you would rather code in a private, local tool, Qualitativist adds tags and advanced search on the same transcription engine.

Whisper models transcribe 99 languages. Set the language for each file when you add it, or choose a default in the settings if most of your study is in one language. With Parakeet, setting the language explicitly gives the best results, as automatic detection can reduce accuracy.

Yes. Once your models are downloaded, transcription works completely offline, whether you are on a train, at a field site, in a participant’s home or in a library with poor connectivity. The app connects only to check your licence and to download a model the first time you use it.

With a subscription, export the project as a single archive containing its recordings, transcripts and notes, then transfer it through a channel your institution approves. Your colleague imports it into their own copy of the app and finds the study exactly as you left it. Since the archive contains the recordings themselves, check that sharing them is covered by your consent forms and ethics approval.

Yes. Write to sam@transcription-app.com for multiple licences or institutional purchases, including invoicing through a grant or a department. Each licence is linked to the devices you verify, and a device can be unlinked from the settings when someone changes machine.