Transcribe a 2-hour oral history A life story, indexed by place, year and name.
A 2-hour oral history interview is 120 minutes and is transcribed in about 4 minutes; a 16-bit, 44.1 kHz stereo WAV of that length is about 1.27 GB, while a 24-bit, 96 kHz archival master is about 4.1 GB. One interview uses 120 of the 300 minutes in the $4 pack, and the opening minutes are a free preview.
Oral history
For historical societies, family projects and archives.
The recording behind it
Oral histories are usually captured on a handheld recorder at a kitchen table or in a care-home lounge, saved as WAV for preservation. Some projects record over video call instead. Upload the preservation master directly, or a Google Drive link if the project keeps its files there.
Archival masters and the size limits
Every file can be up to 5 GB or 10 hours. A 24-bit, 96 kHz stereo master of two hours is about 4.1 GB and uploads with or without a pack, because one file can be up to 5 GB. A 16-bit access copy at about 1.27 GB uploads right away.
What the archive receives
A brief with the narrator's main themes and takeaways, chapters by period of life or topic with timestamps, and a list of the places, people, years and events mentioned, which is the start of a finding aid. Narrator and interviewer are identified and named in the summary, key quotes and chapters.
Sizing a project
Packs start at $4 for 300 minutes. Credits never expire, so a project that collects slowly loses nothing.
The transcription backlog
Why oral history collections sit untranscribed.
✗ Recordings on a shelf
Hand transcription takes several hours per recorded hour, so collections grow faster than anyone can type.
- Boxes of WAV files with no index
- Volunteers burned out on typing
- Place names nobody can search
- Tools that cap file length or size
- Archival masters too large to send
- Researchers told to listen in person
✓ A searchable collection
Each interview as text, with chapters and a list of what was named.
- 120 minutes in one upload
- About 4 minutes to text
- Places, years and names listed
- Chapters by life stage
- DOCX for the reading room
- JSON for the catalogue
Sample output
An hour into a life-story interview.
Illustrative lines written for this page, not from a real narrator.
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
2-hour oral histories, answered.
How fast is a 2-hour oral history transcribed?
About 4 minutes. Processing runs at roughly 2 minutes per hour of audio; the public proof page shows a 9.31-hour file finished in 1,033 seconds.
Can I upload the 24-bit preservation master?
Yes, up to 5 GB per file. A master over 2 GB uploads as it is up to 5 GB; a 16-bit or MP3 access copy carries the same speech in a much smaller file.
The narrator has a strong regional accent and uses dialect words. Will that come through?
Regional speech is handled, and 99 languages are detected automatically, including a narrator who switches between languages, which is transcribed on the main one. Plan to check place names and family names against your own notes, as with any transcript.
What does a project cost?
Each 2-hour interview is 120 minutes. Packs start at $4 for 300 minutes, and credits never expire. A first-time visitor gets the opening minutes of a narrator's interview free, enough to hear how the accent and the room come through.
A session ran over 10 hours across two days. How do I handle it?
Upload each day as its own file. One file can hold up to 10 hours, and anything longer becomes two files, each with its own timestamps and chapters.
Who can access the recordings?
Interviews are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training, which matters when a narrator has signed a release for your archive and nobody else. The collection downloads as TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT or JSON, and the JSON keeps the timestamps a catalogue or finding aid can link to.
Related
More for oral history projects.
Two hours of memory. Searchable in four minutes.
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