Qualitative Research - Transcription help

If you just can't, or just don't want to do your own time-consuming transcription of your qualitative data recordings (e.g. interviews), here are some resources that may be of help. Some are free, some charge a fee, and some will give you some free time to start and then charge

In all cases, if you are unsure if the services below meet privacy/ethical requirements for your research, it would be best to consult with the Office of Research Ethics

Carleton Options

NVivo Transcription:

Carleton' provides free access to this automated transcription service
Vetted by CU for meeting Research Ethics guidelines.
You don't HAVE to use NVivo in order to use the Transcription service
You must first register to use this service , see our NVivo Transcription page for more help

Carleton's Mediaspace

Login to Mediaspace with your MyCarletonOne login/pwd
Upload your audio or video files
Once logged in and media uploaded, select to view “my media”
Click on the file you want to use
Under Actions (below and to right of media player) --> Order Captions
May take a bit of time, but once captions are ready, go under Actions --> Captions Request and you should see the caption file and option to edit.
When done, you can edit the captions within Mediaspace.
You can download the caption file, it will be a .srt file.
If you just rename the file, changing the .srt file extension to .txt, you have a text file with time stamps.

Other Options

For recent reviews of some best bets: Best speech to text software in 2022: Free, paid and online voice recognition apps and services

The following are some possibilities.

Allows uploading of media files:

Otter.ai: Some free options (limit on length of recording) but a popular service
Speechnotes - can dictate via microphone or upload files
NVivo's Transcription module: Not free. For anyone using NVivo, you have access to their Transcription module from within your myNVivo account.
Transcribe - dictate or upload files, free 1 week trial, fee afterwards
TranscribeMe ($0.79 per minute): offers very competitive pricing for transcription. Offers various student discounts. "First Draft" is highly accurate and comes within a day.
Watson speech to text can upload audio files, free version allows 500 min/month
YouTube:
- If you have an audio file, convert it to video^* (usually mp3 audio to mp4 video) and upload to your YouTube account
  *use something like VLC Player or media.io to do the audio to "video" conversion
- Mark video as private
- YouTube will transcribe your file for closed captioning, provides editor to correct any errors
- Can then download your transcription and edit to your format requirements.

No uploading of files:

You would need to re-speak the audio into a microphone (still faster than traditional transcribing)

Google Docs Voice Typing - free, need Google account. Create a new Google Doc & select “voice typing” option from the “tools” menu.
Dragon Home - not free, and no longer supported on Macs
Dictation.io - free app for Google Chrome that allows you to transform speech to text without downloading or installing anything. Only works on computer, not on tablets