Transcribe a recording made in a library every soft-spoken hour of it.
An oral-history or research interview recorded in a library study room usually runs one and a half to three hours, and two hours comes back as text in about 4 minutes. The first 20 minutes are free, and ten two-hour interviews fit a $12 pack of 2,000 minutes.
What a quiet room gives you
Libraries are kind to recordings. The difficulty is the length and the soft voices.
Quiet helps, mostly
Carpet, shelving and closed doors absorb echo, which is why study rooms make some of the cleanest interview audio we see. The catch is that people lower their voices in a library. Keep the recorder between the two chairs rather than at one end of the table, and the quiet replies come back as clearly as the questions.
Long answers stay whole
Oral-history narrators talk for ten minutes at a stretch, circle back and correct a date. One file keeps that shape: the whole session runs on a single clock, so a correction at 1:40 can be matched to the first telling at 0:25.
A project, priced as one
Twenty hours of interviews is 1,200 minutes, which sits inside the $12 pack of 2,000 minutes at $0.36 per audio hour. The remaining 800 minutes stay on the account with no expiry, ready for follow-up sessions next term. Start on upload page or drop the first interview here.
Ready for coding and citation
Each interview arrives with a brief, chapters by topic, and the names, places and years the narrator mentioned. The narrator and the interviewer are named in the summary, key quotes and chapters, and the DOCX export is the starting draft for an appendix or a finding aid.
Where interview projects slow down
Recording takes an afternoon. Typing it up takes a week.
✗ Transcribing interviews by hand
A two-hour interview takes most of a working day to type, and a ten-interview project eats a month of evenings.
- Six to eight hours typing per recorded hour
- Pausing every few seconds on a soft voice
- A free tier that ends before the narrator warms up
- Losing a year or a place name on replay
- No timestamps for the citation
- A backlog that delays analysis by weeks
✓ Each interview, sent as recorded
Upload the file as the recorder saved it and read the whole conversation the same afternoon.
- About 4 minutes for a 2-hour interview
- The first 20 minutes free to judge the audio
- Ten interviews inside a $12 pack
- Names, places and years listed in the brief
- Chapters you can cite by timestamp
- DOCX for the appendix, JSON for your tools
Sample
An oral-history session, as it comes back.
The sample below is illustrative, written for this page rather than drawn from any customer interview. Names and places are left out on purpose.
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
Library interview recordings, answered.
How quickly does a long interview come back?
The rate is about 2 minutes per hour of audio. A 90-minute interview takes about 3 minutes and a 3-hour session about 6. Several files can go up one after another, and each waits in your Library when done.
What does an interview project cost?
Add up the minutes. Ten interviews of two hours each come to 1,200 minutes, which fits the $12 pack of 2,000 minutes. A single interview of up to about 8 hours fits the $6 pack of 500. A first-time visitor gets the first 20 minutes free, and the pack transcribes the rest from where that preview ended.
My recorder saves WAV. Is the file too large?
An hour of CD-quality WAV is roughly 600 MB, so a 3-hour session is close to 2 GB, the size that uploads before a first pack. Each file can be up to 10 hours or 5 GB once a pack is on the account. There is no need to split an interview into parts.
Does the quiet of a library make a difference?
Yes, in your favour. Low background noise means fewer missed words. The one thing to watch is distance: a narrator who speaks softly and sits far from the recorder will come through less clearly than one sitting close.
Can the interview be in another language?
99 languages are detected automatically. Interviews in Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Tagalog and many more work without a setting. A narrator who drifts between two languages is transcribed on the main one, with English and Tagalog switches handled.
Which formats come back, and is the recording kept private?
You get TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and JSON. Interviews often hold family and personal detail, so this matters: recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training, and you can delete a file and its transcript whenever you choose.
Related
More on interview recordings
Send the interview. The first 20 minutes of it are free.
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