Transcription for oral historians a narrator's sessions, drafted in minutes.
An oral historian with a 2.5-hour life-history session gets a draft transcript back in about 5 minutes, with chapters and the names, places and dates the narrator mentioned listed. Four sessions of 2.5 hours with one narrator are 600 minutes, which fits the $18 pack of 3,000 minutes, and the opening minutes are a free preview.
What an oral historian records
Long, unhurried interviews, returned as a draft for review and the archive.
New sessions and old tapes
Sessions recorded today on a field recorder, and cassettes or reels digitised for the collection, are both uploaded as files. Each session goes in on its own, so the narrator's childhood and working life keep separate transcripts and chapters.
A draft, not the final
The text that comes back is a draft for your auditing pass and for the narrator's review, under your archive's own transcription guidelines. The time it saves is the hours of first-pass typing, not the careful listening that follows.
Material for the index
Names, places, dates and organisations the narrator mentioned are listed, and the brief sums up the session's themes. Those lists are the raw material for an index, an abstract and a catalogue record.
A project, worked out
One narrator in four 2.5-hour sessions is 600 minutes, on the $18 pack of 3,000 minutes. A project of 12 narrators at about 6 hours each is 4,320 minutes, inside the $32 pack of 6,000 minutes. A single 2-hour session is 120 minutes from the $4 pack of 300 minutes.
Why collections wait for transcripts
The interviews are recorded; the transcripts are years behind.
✗ A backlog of audio
Typing a long interview by hand takes several hours per recorded hour, so collections grow faster than they can be transcribed.
- Sessions catalogued without text
- Researchers who can only listen
- Tapes digitised but never indexed
- Volunteers typing for weeks
- Large WAV files refused by upload tools
- No search across the collection
✓ A draft for every session
Each recording returns with a draft transcript, chapters and lists that feed the catalogue.
- About 5 minutes per 2.5-hour session
- Chapters through the life story
- Narrator and interviewer named in the summary
- Names, places and dates listed
- Search across every session
- DOCX for review, TXT for the archive
Sample
Part of a life-history session, transcribed.
An illustrative sample written for this page; it is not from a real narrator, family or collection.
Export
One transcript. Five clean formats.
Every pack exports all five — no format is held back for a higher tier.
Plain text
De-ummed paragraphs. Ready to paste.
SRT captions
Timed to the speech. Every video editor reads this.
WebVTT
HTML5 player + YouTube uploads.
Show notes
Formatted with chapters and pull-quotes.
Machine-readable
Timestamped text for your own tools.
Pricing
Honest pricing, no surprises.
A pack from $4 (300 minutes) opens the full transcript. After that, no subscription and no auto-renew — every tier is a one-time minute pack, and credits never expire. Buy once, use the minutes whenever you need them.
Casual pack
$4/300 min
5 hours of audio — $0.80 an hour. One-time — credits never expire.
- 300 minutes of audio
- All export formats
- AI chat over the whole transcript
- Executive summary & key quote
Best value
$18/3,000 min
50 hours of audio — $0.36 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 3,000 minutes of audio
- Summary, chapters and key quotes
- All export formats
- AI chat over the whole transcript
Bulk pack
$32/6,000 min
100 hours of audio — $0.32 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 6,000 minutes of audio
- Summary, chapters and key quotes
- API access for batch pipelines
- All export formats
FAQ
Oral historians ask these first.
What should be in place before I upload?
The narrator's recording agreement or release, and its terms on how the recording may be processed and shared. That caution matters more than anything else on this page. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training.
My WAV masters are very large. Will they upload?
A 3-hour WAV at archive quality can be around 2 GB. One file can be up to 5 GB or 10 hours, with or without a pack on the account. Uploading an MP3 or FLAC access copy instead of the master also works, as long as your software can export one.
How well does it handle dialect and local place names?
Languages are detected automatically, 99 of them, and English terms inside speech in another language are handled. Local place names, family names and dialect words are where your review pass matters most, so check them against the audio.
How long does a session take?
About 2 minutes per hour of audio: a 2.5-hour session in about 5 minutes and a 6-hour day of recording in about 12.
What if a session ran longer than 10 hours?
Split it at a natural break and upload two files. Each part comes back with its own transcript and chapters.
What can I export for the archive?
You get TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and JSON. DOCX suits the narrator's review, TXT and JSON suit a catalogue, and SRT or VTT can caption the recording if it is published.
Related
More for oral history
Upload one session. A draft to review, not to type.
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