Transcribe oral history recordings in Australia, a life story at a time.
A community or family oral history interview of 2 to 4 hours comes back as text in about 4 to 8 minutes, and the first 20 minutes are free. Two 3-hour interviews, 360 minutes, fit the $6 pack of 500 minutes, and a project of twenty such interviews fits the $24 pack of 5,000.
For historical societies, families and researchers
Hours of memory, turned into text a family or a local archive can read.
From recorder, tape or Drive
An interview recorded on a handheld recorder or a phone is uploaded as the file it made. Cassettes digitised years ago are often WAV; a shared folder of interviews on Google Drive can be pasted as a link and every recording in it comes through.
Chapters that follow a life
Long interviews wander from childhood to work to the places a family moved. Chapters with timestamps mark each period, and the summary names the narrator and interviewer so a reader knows whose memory each passage is.
A project, counted
Twenty interviews of 3 hours make 3,600 minutes, inside the $24 pack of 5,000 with 1,400 left for follow-up sessions. A family project of a few interviews usually fits the $12 pack of 2,000 minutes.
Large WAV files
Uncompressed CD-quality stereo runs at 1,411 kbps, about 635 MB an hour, so a 3-hour WAV is near 1.9 GB and fits the 2 GB limit before a first pack. A 4-hour WAV of about 2.5 GB starts once a pack is on the account, or converts to MP3 at a fraction of the size.
Why oral histories stay on the shelf
The interviews were recorded. Nobody had the weeks it takes to type them.
✗ Recorded, not readable
Typing a 3-hour interview by hand can take a volunteer days. Meanwhile the recordings sit on old drives and cassettes, and the people who could explain the names in them grow older.
- Days of typing for every interview
- Tapes that have never been digitised
- Names and places nobody wrote down
- No index to a 4-hour conversation
- Family members who will not sit through audio
- Services that cap length at an hour
✓ A story people can read
Each interview becomes a document a family can print and a society can index. The timestamps let an archivist go back to the voice whenever a name or a date needs checking.
- Six minutes or so for a 3-hour interview
- Narrator named in the summary and quotes
- Chapters by decade or place
- Years, streets and surnames collected
- Chat to ask what was said about a town
- DOCX for printing and editing
Sample
A life-story interview, as the text returns.
This sample is illustrative and was written for this page; the narrator, places and family are invented. Interviewer and narrator are labels for the people a summary would name.
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
Oral history recordings, the common questions.
How long does a 4-hour oral history interview take?
Roughly 8 minutes, because each audio hour takes about 2. A 2-hour interview takes about 4, so a weekend of sessions can be ready the same afternoon.
What does a whole project cost?
Two 3-hour interviews fit the $6 pack of 500 minutes. Ten of them make 1,800 minutes on the $12 pack of 2,000, and twenty make 3,600 on the $24 pack of 5,000. Prices are in US dollars and credits never expire, so a project can run for years.
The interview was recorded over two days. Do I join the files?
No need. Upload each day as its own file, up to 10 hours or 5 GB each, and each transcript keeps its own timestamps that match its own recording.
What about interviews in a language other than English?
99 languages are detected automatically, so an interview in Italian, Greek, Vietnamese or Arabic is transcribed in that language with no setting. When a narrator switches language, the recording is detected on its main language; check the switched passages against the audio.
Will background noise or a ticking clock spoil it?
The voices are written out; music, clocks and room noise are not written out. A recorder placed close to the narrator gives a cleaner result than one across the room.
What do I receive, and is the interview kept private?
DOCX and TXT for the transcript, SRT and VTT for a captioned copy, JSON for archive software. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training; a family's interview can be deleted whenever they ask.
Related
More for life-story recordings
Begin with a single interview. Give the story a page as well as a voice.
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