Transcribe a 3-hour oral history while the narrator's words are still fresh in your notes.
A 3-hour oral history interview is 180 minutes of audio, and at about 2 minutes per audio hour it comes back as timestamped text in roughly 6 minutes; the file is usually around 170 MB as an MP3 and just under 1.9 GB as CD-quality WAV, so either one uploads before you buy anything. Packs start at $4 for 300 minutes, and credits never expire.
From tape to finding aid
Three hours of remembering, turned into text a cataloguer can search by year, street and name.
Six minutes for a whole session
A narrator who takes three hours to get from the family farm to retirement does not slow the machine. Processing runs at about 2 minutes per audio hour, so the session is usually readable before you have finished labelling the memory card. Keep the tab open: the transcript appears there the moment it is ready, and it stays in your Library.
WAV, M4A or a digitised cassette
Field recorders write WAV, phones write M4A, and archives digitise old cassettes side by side. Three hours of 16-bit, 44.1 kHz stereo WAV is about 1.9 GB and goes up before any pack; the same session recorded at 24-bit, 48 kHz is about 3.1 GB and starts once a pack is on the account. Projects that keep sessions in a shared Google Drive folder can paste the folder link instead of uploading.
Years, places and people pulled forward
The brief lists the names, numbers and dates the narrator said, and chapters with timestamps mark where the story turns: school, the move to the city, the first job, the strike, the children. The interviewer and the narrator are named in the summary, key quotes and chapters, which gives you a first abstract to correct rather than a blank page.
A balance that waits between sessions
Credits never expire, so a project that records one narrator a month keeps the 320 or more minutes left after the first session for the next one. A longer file goes through upload page, and nothing about the recording is used to train any model.
Where oral history projects stall
The recordings are made in an afternoon; the transcripts take a season.
✗ The volunteer queue
A three-hour session can take a careful typist several working days, and the archive shelf fills faster than anyone can type.
- Sessions waiting months for a volunteer
- Tapes cut in half to pass a small upload cap
- A new clock for every half
- Village and family names guessed at
- No index until someone listens again
- Narrators passing before their words are read
✓ One upload per session
The interview goes up as recorded and comes back on a single timeline the same afternoon.
- Text in about 6 minutes
- a free preview of the opening minutes to test the voice and accent
- Packs from $4 for 300 minutes
- Dates and places listed in the brief
- Chapters that seed the finding aid
- Exports for the archive and the catalogue
Sample
A few minutes from a three-hour life story.
Illustrative only: written for this page, with no real narrator or collection behind it. Timestamps count from the start of the file.
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
Three-hour oral history sessions: common questions.
How long does a 3-hour oral history take to transcribe?
Roughly 6 minutes, because processing runs at about 2 minutes per hour of audio. Our public proof page shows a 9.31-hour file finished in 1,033 seconds, so three hours is well inside the range we have measured.
Which pack covers one session, and which covers a whole project?
One 180-minute session fits the $4 pack of 300 minutes, after the opening minutes come free. A project of 25 such sessions, 4,500 minutes, fits the $32 pack of 6,000 minutes.
My archive digitised the session as high-resolution WAV. Will it upload?
Before the first pack, files up to 5 GB upload. Three hours of 24-bit, 48 kHz stereo is about 3.1 GB, so it starts once a pack is on the account, and every file up to 5 GB is accepted after that. Converting a copy to MP3 brings it to about 170 MB if you want to try the free minutes first.
The interview ran over two days. One file or two?
Either works. A file can run up to 10 hours or 5 GB, whichever comes first, so two three-hour days joined together still fit in one file. Keeping each day as its own file gives each its own chapters and brief, which many archives prefer for cataloguing.
What if the narrator switches to another language?
99 languages are detected automatically, and a recording that moves between languages is detected on its main language. Passages in a second language, a song or a prayer are worth a second listen before the transcript goes into the collection. Background music is not transcribed; the speech is.
What happens to the recording and the consent terms?
Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training. You can delete the file and its transcript at any time, which helps when a release form limits how long copies are kept.
Related
Other long sessions for archives and research
Send the session as it was recorded. Read the opening minutes before you pay.
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