Getting a transcript
- The complete guide to interview transcription
How to turn a recorded interview into an accurate, usable transcript, what affects quality, which route to take, and how to review the result properly.
- How long does it take to transcribe an hour of audio?
How much time to budget for an hour of audio: 4 to 6 hours typing it yourself, minutes plus a review pass with software, days from a human service, and how to estimate your own recording.
- How to transcribe a recording for free
Every genuinely free route to a transcript, manual, built-in tools, free tiers, and open-source models, with an honest account of what each one costs you in time, effort, and privacy.
- Transcribe a Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams recording
A practical, start-to-finish guide to turning the meeting recording sitting in your downloads or cloud storage into an accurate written transcript.
Choosing a tool
- The best free ways to transcribe audio in 2026
An honest comparison of every real way to get a free transcript in 2026: running an open speech model yourself, free tiers of transcription services, the tools already built into your phone and video platform, and doing it by hand.
- DIY vs automated vs human transcription: how to choose
Typing it yourself, running it through software, or paying a person each make sense in different situations, here is how to tell which one fits yours.
- How to run Whisper yourself, and when it is worth it
A real, working walkthrough of running OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition on your own machine, plus an honest look at when that beats paying for a transcription service.
Recording quality and editing
- How to prepare audio so it transcribes accurately
The quality of a transcript is mostly decided before you ever upload the file, here is how to record so the words come back right.
- How to get a clean transcript from a rough recording
Practical, step-by-step advice for salvaging noisy, echoey, or distant audio, before, during, and after transcription.
- How to edit and clean up a transcript
A practical, step-by-step workflow for turning a raw machine transcript into a clean, readable document, fixing names, cutting filler, labeling speakers, and exporting it in the right format to share.
Formats, timestamps, and privacy
- Transcript and subtitle formats explained
A practical guide to the four most common transcript and subtitle export formats, what each one actually contains, where it works, and how to pick the right one before you download.
- Timestamps in transcripts: what they are for
A practical guide to reading, choosing, and using time codes so a three-hour recording becomes something you can actually navigate.
- Transcription privacy: what happens to your audio
A plain-language walkthrough of where your recordings go when you upload them to a transcription service, and how to judge whether that journey is acceptable to you.