Transcribe long interviews recorded across South Africa.
A long interview recorded in South Africa, a 90-minute source conversation or a two-hour oral history, transcribes in about 3 to 4 minutes. You read the first 20 minutes free, and a $6 pack of 500 minutes covers five or more interviews of that length.
For people who quote what was said
An interview is only useful if you can find the sentence again.
Every quote traceable
Every line carries a timestamp, so a quote in an article or report can be checked against the recording in seconds. The key quotes in the brief come with the speaker's role and the time they were said.
Oral history at length
Life-story interviews often run two hours or more and wander between decades. Chapters mark where the conversation turns, so a researcher can find the part about a particular place or year without replaying the session.
HR and panel interviews
Recorded selection panels and exit interviews need an accurate record more than a polished one. The transcript keeps the questions and answers in order, and the brief lists the dates, figures and commitments that came up.
A project's worth of minutes
Twenty interviews of 90 minutes each is 1,800 minutes. That fits the $12 pack of 2,000 minutes, which works out to about $0.36 per hour of recording.
Why long interviews are slow elsewhere
Transcribing an interview by hand takes longer than doing it.
✗ The usual route
Students, reporters and researchers end up typing for days or paying per page for someone else to.
- Four to six hours of typing per hour of talk
- Pedals and players that need setting up
- Free tools that cut off long before the end
- Accents and code-switching that throw the text off
- Quotes copied from memory rather than the tape
- Files emailed to strangers for typing
✓ Here
Upload the recording and spend the time on the reading, not the typing.
- About 2 minutes per hour of interview
- The interviewee named in the summary and quotes
- A timestamp on each line for checking
- Chapters by topic, not by minute
- Chat over the transcript to find a theme
- DOCX for the appendix, JSON for analysis software
Sample
An oral history interview, about an hour in.
Illustrative only: this excerpt was written for the page and does not come from a real interview. It shows how questions and long answers appear with their timestamps.
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
Long interviews from South Africa: what people ask.
How fast is a two-hour interview transcribed?
About 4 minutes, at roughly 2 minutes per audio hour. A 90-minute interview takes about 3, and a recorder file that is mostly quiet can run a little quicker.
What does a long interview project cost?
One two-hour interview is 120 minutes on the $6 pack of 500 minutes. A project of 20 ninety-minute interviews is 1,800 minutes, which fits the $12 pack of 2,000 minutes. Everything is priced in US dollars, with no subscription, and the first 20 minutes free for a first-time visitor.
My recorder made one long WAV. Will it upload?
Two hours of uncompressed WAV is roughly 1.3 GB, under the 2 GB that uploads before the first pack. A single file can be as long as 10 hours or 5 GB after a pack, so there is no reason to cut an interview into pieces.
Can it handle Afrikaans or Zulu interviews?
Yes. English, Afrikaans and Zulu are detected on their own, along with the rest of 99 languages. If the conversation moves between two of them, the transcript is made in the main language of the recording, so read the other-language passages before quoting them.
Who can see a sensitive interview?
Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training, and nobody types your recording by hand. You can delete the recording and transcript once your work is done.
Which files can I take away?
DOCX for a thesis appendix or a story draft, TXT for plain notes, SRT and VTT for a filmed interview, and JSON when the text goes into qualitative analysis software.
Related
More on long interviews
Upload the interview. Start with 20 minutes free.
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