Why interview audio deserves more care than a podcast
When you recorded your participants, you almost certainly promised them confidentiality in your consent form. That promise is hard to keep if a transcription tool quietly forwards recordings to an outside AI provider. FastScribe never does: transcription happens entirely on our own servers, so no third-party model ever receives your participants' voices.
Retention is just as deliberate. The audio file is deleted the moment your transcript is ready, and only the text is kept so you can come back and export it again. You keep the master recordings under your own storage plan; we hold the words, not the sound.
From raw recording to a transcript you can code
For qualitative coding, export plain TXT: it pastes cleanly into NVivo, ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA, or a plain document for manual thematic analysis. If you plan to present video clips of an interview at a defense or conference, SRT and VTT give you timed captions that stay aligned with playback. Pro accounts add DOCX export for a formatted transcript to include in an appendix.
Our transcription engine is accurate, but no automatic transcript is flawless, and FastScribe does not label who is speaking. Plan a cleanup pass where you listen back, fix any misheard jargon from your field, and add speaker labels. For most researchers this doubles as a useful first immersion in the data before formal coding begins.
If your interviews happened over Zoom, Teams, or another video platform, FastScribe works with uploaded files only. Download the recording file from the platform to your computer first, then upload it here like any other recording.
Handling a full dissertation's worth of interviews
Thesis interviews routinely run an hour or more, which is past the ten-minute free first file. Pro, at twelve dollars a month, accepts files up to two gigabytes and five hours each, comfortably beyond even a long semi-structured interview, with unlimited files under fair use.
Pro also fits the rhythm of fieldwork: batch uploads let you queue a whole day of interviews at once, the priority queue gets transcripts back sooner, and your transcript history is kept forever, so a transcript you made in year two is still there when you write up in year four.
Frequently asked questions
Will my participants' audio be used to train an AI model?
Your recordings never leave our own servers, so no third-party AI service ever receives them. The audio itself is deleted the moment your transcript is ready, and only the text transcript is kept for you.
Can I test FastScribe on one interview before uploading my whole study?
Yes. Your first file is free with no signup, up to fifty megabytes and ten minutes, a good fit for a pilot interview or an excerpt. Creating a free account raises that to thirty minutes and one hundred megabytes.
My interviews run sixty to ninety minutes each. Can FastScribe handle them?
Yes, on a Pro account, which accepts files up to five hours and two gigabytes each for twelve dollars a month, with batch uploads so you can queue several interviews at once.
Does the transcript identify which speaker is talking?
No, FastScribe does not label speakers. Most researchers add speaker labels during their cleanup pass while checking the transcript against the recording, which also serves as an early familiarization step before coding.