Transcribe recordings from a field site wind, distance and all.
Ethnographic and agricultural interviews recorded outdoors at a field site usually run one to three hours each, and they are transcribed at about 2 minutes per hour of audio. The first 20 minutes are free, and a 40-hour field season fits the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes.
What the outdoors does to audio
Wind on the microphone and a speaker three metres away. Here is what still comes back.
Wind is the real problem
Gusts hitting the microphone make a low roar that can swallow a whole sentence, and no transcription fixes a word the recorder never captured. A foam or fur windscreen, or simply turning your back to the wind, saves more words than any setting. Birds, livestock and traffic in the distance matter far less.
Distance thins the voice
An interviewer close to the recorder and a respondent a few metres away sound very different on playback. The near voice comes back cleanly; the far one loses quiet endings of sentences. Put the recorder nearer the person you came to hear.
A season, priced
Forty interviews of an hour each are 2,400 minutes, which is more than the $12 pack and fits the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes at about $0.29 per audio hour. Minutes never expire, so a second season next year draws from the same pack. Start at upload page or drop the first interview here.
Back from the field with text
Each interview returns with a brief, chapters by topic and the names, places, quantities and dates mentioned. Speakers are named in the summary, key quotes and chapters, which gives you a coding scheme's first pass before you sit down with the full text.
Why field audio waits
The season ends, and the transcription backlog starts.
✗ A drive full of interviews
Researchers come home with dozens of hours and months of typing ahead before analysis can begin.
- Six or more hours of typing per interview hour
- Re-listening to windy passages again and again
- Tools that stop at a short free limit
- Interviews cut into parts to upload
- Local terms and place names lost
- Analysis delayed by a whole term
✓ Text before the next trip
Upload each interview as the recorder saved it and start coding the same week.
- About 2 minutes per interview hour
- The first 20 minutes free to test windy audio
- Forty hours inside a $24 pack
- Places, quantities and dates in the brief
- Chapters by topic for coding
- DOCX and JSON for your analysis tools
Sample
An outdoor interview, as the transcript reads.
Illustrative only: this sample was written for the page and is not from a customer's fieldwork. The bracketed gap shows what a gust of wind tends to leave.
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
Field site recordings, answered.
How long does a field interview take to transcribe?
About 2 minutes per hour of audio: a 90-minute interview is back in about 3 minutes, a 3-hour walk-through in about 6. You can upload the files from a guesthouse connection and read them later.
What does a field season cost?
Total the minutes. Up to 500 fits the $6 pack, up to 2,000 the $12 pack, and up to 5,000 the $24 pack. A season of 40 one-hour interviews, 2,400 minutes, goes on the $24 pack. A first-time visitor gets the first 20 minutes free, and the pack transcribes the rest of that recording.
The connection at the site is slow. Can I send a link?
Yes. Files saved to a Google Drive share link or folder are fetched directly, so the upload happens once from wherever you have a signal. Each file can be up to 10 hours or 5 GB; before the first pack, files up to 2 GB go through. Nothing has to be split.
Respondents speak a regional language. Will it work?
99 languages are detected automatically, including Tagalog, Spanish, Portuguese, Afrikaans and Zulu. Regional Philippine languages such as Cebuano, Hiligaynon or Waray are supported, but accuracy trails the major languages: treat the result as a fast first draft and plan one review pass.
What can wind and distance cost me?
Words, not whole interviews. A sentence spoken into a gust may be missing or partly wrong, and a soft-spoken respondent at a distance loses some endings. Check the passages you plan to quote against the audio using the timestamps.
Which exports come back, and who can hear the interviews?
Each interview exports as TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and JSON. Field data often carries consent conditions. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training, and you can delete a recording and its transcript whenever your protocol requires.
Related
Related interview work
Send the first interview. The first 20 minutes free, wind and all.
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