Transcription for PhD students thesis interviews and supervision meetings.
A 75-minute thesis interview comes back as text in about 2.5 minutes, at roughly 2 minutes per audio hour. Packs start at $4 for 300 minutes, and credits never expire.
What a doctorate records
Fieldwork interviews in year two, and a supervision meeting every fortnight for four years.
Thesis interviews
Interviews are usually recorded on a phone, a handheld recorder or a video call, and run 45 minutes to two hours. Each comes back with a brief, chapters that follow your question schedule, the names, numbers and dates mentioned, and a chat you can ask where a participant raised a topic.
Supervision meetings
An hour with your supervisors is easy to half-remember. Record it with their agreement, upload it afterwards, and the brief lists what was decided and the questions that are still open, with chapters you can jump back to when a comment needs re-hearing before you revise a chapter.
A doctorate, priced
Twenty-five interviews of 75 minutes is 1,875 minutes, inside the $18 pack of 3,000. Twenty fortnightly supervisions of an hour add 1,200; both together are 3,075 minutes, which the $32 pack of 6,000 covers. Packs are one-time and credits never expire, so the balance waits through writing up.
The caution: what your ethics approval says
Your ethics application and consent forms usually say how recordings will be transcribed and stored. Check they allow an external service before you upload, and amend them if needed. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training. Files over 500 MB continue on upload page.
Why transcription eats a PhD
Every hour of interview used to cost a day of typing. That is a term per study.
✗ Typing it yourself
Students type their own interviews to save money and lose weeks they needed for analysis.
- A day of typing per interview hour
- A grant that never covered transcription
- Interviews waiting months to be typed
- Supervision advice remembered wrongly
- Free tools that cut off long files
- A subscription paid while writing up
✓ Text the day you record
Upload after each interview and start analysing while the conversation is fresh.
- About 2.5 minutes per 75-minute interview
- Chapters that follow your schedule
- Supervision decisions in a brief
- Quotes found by timestamp
- TXT and DOCX for analysis
- $18 for most fieldwork
Sample
Part of a thesis interview, as text.
Illustrative only: written for this page and not from any real interview or participant.
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
Transcription for PhD students, answered.
How fast is a thesis interview transcribed?
About 2 minutes per hour of audio. A 75-minute interview is back in about 2.5 minutes, and a two-hour one in around 4.
What will my whole fieldwork cost?
Count the minutes. Packs start at $4 for 300 minutes, and credits never expire. The opening minutes are a free preview, and nothing renews.
Can I quote straight from the transcript?
Check each quote against the recording first; the timestamps take you to the passage. Many students also note in the methods chapter that an AI first draft was checked against the audio.
My interviews were on Zoom or Teams.
Download the recording the platform saved and upload it; nothing joins your call. If the participant was on a phone line, recording needs the consent the law where you are requires, which your consent form should already cover.
Interviews in a language other than English?
Detection is automatic across 99 languages, and each file is transcribed on its main language. A participant who switches into English for technical terms is handled.
How big can a file be?
Up to 10 hours or 5 GB. Files up to 5 GB start immediately and a larger one can be split or sent as audio. You can export TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT or JSON.
Related
More for doctoral research
Upload your first interview. Spend the term on analysis, not typing.
Transcribe a thesis interviewOperated by Neugence Technology Pvt. Ltd. · contact@whipscribe.com · Security · Privacy · Terms