Transcribe French oral history in Canada in the narrator's own French.
A family or community oral history recorded in Québécois or Acadian French is transcribed here as French text, and a 2-hour interview comes back in about 4 minutes. The first 20 minutes are free, two 2-hour interviews fit the $6 pack of 500 minutes, and twenty of them, 2,400 minutes, belong on the $24 pack.
For families, societies and archives
A grandparent's two hours of memories, written down in their own words.
Old tapes and new phones
A phone recording from a kitchen table or a digitised cassette goes in as one file, up to 10 hours or 5 GB. If a cassette was digitised as WAV and the upload refuses it, convert it to MP3 first, then upload on upload page.
A life in chapters
Childhood, the parish, the move to the city, work, family: the narrator's story is divided into chapters with timestamps, so a relative can find the part about the farm without the full interview.
Names, places, years
Village names, family names, years and occupations mentioned are listed beside the transcript, a head start for a genealogy or a local history society's index.
Ask the recording
Ask the chat where the narrator talks about the school or the fishing season, in English or French, and it answers from the transcript with the timestamp.
Why oral histories sit untranscribed
Hours of voices in a drawer, waiting for someone with time to type.
✗ Recordings kept as audio only
Precious, and almost impossible to search.
- Hours to type a single interview
- Names spelled however someone guessed
- Cassettes nobody can play now
- Services that expect Parisian French
- Upload limits under an hour
- A subscription for a one-time project
✓ Recordings as French text
The words kept, and findable.
- Two hours back in about 4 minutes
- Québécois and Acadian speech as French
- Chapters by period of life
- Narrator named in the summary
- Places and years listed
- Credits that never expire
Sample
A French oral history, as the text comes back.
This illustrative sample was written for this page and is not from any real family, narrator or archive. Labels mark parts of the interview.
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 $6 (500 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
$6/500 min
8 hours of audio — $0.72 an hour. One-time — credits never expire.
- 500 minutes of audio
- All export formats
- Unlimited AI chat per transcript
- Executive summary & key quote
Best value
$12/2,000 min
33 hours of audio — $0.36 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 2,000 minutes of audio
- Priority queue
- All export formats
- Unlimited AI chat per transcript
Bulk pack
$24/5,000 min
83 hours of audio — $0.29 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 5,000 minutes of audio
- Priority queue
- API access for batch pipelines
- All export formats
FAQ
French oral history recordings, the common questions.
How long does a 2-hour interview take?
Around 4 minutes, and a 3-hour session about 6. A whole box of digitised tapes can be uploaded one file at a time and processed in parallel. Volunteers at a historical society can spend their time on review instead of typing.
What does a family or community project cost?
Twenty interviews of 2 hours are 2,400 minutes, past the $12 pack, so the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes covers them with room for more. Two such interviews, 240 minutes, fit the $6 pack. Prices are USD. A pack bought for one family's recordings stays on the account for the next round of interviews.
Will strong regional French be understood?
Québécois and Acadian speech are detected and transcribed as French. Old local expressions, Chiac with English words mixed in, and family or place names are where errors appear, so plan one read-through with someone who knows the family or the region.
The narrator switches to English. What happens?
The interview is detected on its main language, French, and English passages are handled inside the same transcript.
Can very old recordings work?
Speech that a listener can make out usually transcribes; hiss, music and background noise are not transcribed. Files can be up to 10 hours or 5 GB, and uploads stop at 2 GB until a pack is on the account. Recordings that are mostly hiss with faint speech give a thinner draft, and the review pass matters more there.
What can I export, and is the family's recording private?
Archives often take DOCX for a reading copy and JSON for timestamps, and the transcript also downloads as TXT, SRT or VTT. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training.
Related
More for oral history
Send the first interview. The first 20 minutes free, a whole family archive from $24.
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