Keep participant recordings off the big cloud services
When a participant signs a consent form, they are trusting you with their voice, their opinions about your product, and sometimes details about their job or company. Pasting that recording into a general-purpose AI chatbot is exactly the kind of handling most consent language never anticipated. FastScribe transcribes on our own servers instead, and nothing is sent to an outside AI provider.
Retention is deliberately short on the audio side: the recording itself is deleted the moment your transcript is ready. Only the text is kept, so you can come back later to re-export a transcript without the original voice recording sitting on someone else's infrastructure.
From raw session to quotes and themes
Every transcript comes back with timestamps, which changes how you do analysis. When you tag a theme in your spreadsheet or research repository, note the timestamp next to it. When a stakeholder later asks "did users really say that?", you can jump straight to the exact moment in the session and play the verbatim quote.
Export TXT when you want clean text to paste into your notes, affinity map, or repository tool. Export SRT or VTT when you are cutting highlight clips for a readout deck and want captions timed to the video. Pro accounts add DOCX export for the polished transcript appendix that goes into the final research report.
Interviews recorded on Zoom, Meet, or Teams
FastScribe works with uploaded files, so it never needs access to your meeting accounts and you never connect a calendar or grant an integration permission to anything. If your sessions live in Zoom or another meeting tool, download the recording file to your computer first, then upload it here. Video files work as well as audio, so you do not need to strip the audio track out before uploading.
Frequently asked questions
Can FastScribe pull my interviews straight from Zoom or Google Meet?
No, and that is intentional. FastScribe only accepts files you upload, so it never connects to your meeting accounts. Download the recording from Zoom or Meet first, then upload the file here.
How private are my participants' recordings?
Transcription runs on our own servers, so the audio never goes to a third-party AI service. The recording is deleted the moment your transcript is ready, and only the text transcript is kept.
My sessions run a full hour. Will they fit?
Your free first file covers up to ten minutes and fifty megabytes, which suits a short pilot session. A free account raises that to thirty minutes and one hundred megabytes, and Pro handles files up to two gigabytes and five hours, so full-length sessions and even double sessions fit.
I have a whole study of eight interviews. Do I upload them one at a time?
On the free tiers, yes, one file at a time. Pro accounts add batch uploads and a priority queue, so you can drop an entire study's recordings in together, and your transcript history is kept forever for later rounds of analysis.