A big “thank you” is due to Hanna (who are you? Why not add yourself to our little map and tell us about your research?) who brought Transcriva to my attention - a lovely little Mac application for transcription. It costs $19.99 but you can try it out with few limitations and it works better in some ways than the software I had been using - Transana - in a number of respects (though Transana does much more than transcription alone). She also reminded me of the existence of Express Scribe which was a commercial product and is now free. It is available in both Windows and Mac versions and claims that it, “works with speech recognition software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking to automatically convert speech to text” which is, of course, the holy grail for transcribers. I wouldn’t expect an interview to work though since you would have two different speakers and background noise to contend with. Windows users may also want to check out Dictation Buddy but it costs $33 and as far as I can tell doesn’t offer any important advantages over Express Scribe.

Or of course if you have the money you can always farm your transcription out to Katwa or another commercial transcribing company (for $50 per hour of transcribed audio). Since it takes around 4 hours (for me at least) to transcribe an hour of audio it may well be worth considering!

Update: I spoke too soon - you should still keep an eye on Transcriva (and Transana is still in Alpha for the Mac so if you are a Mac user you have to ask the programmers for a copy) but I am going back to Transana for the moment as Transcriva has some niggling irritations (eg it doesn’t handle recordings longer than 1hr well for example and doesn’t let you do any text formatting as you type to indicate emphasis).

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2005 at 9:05 am and is filed under Advice, Research methods, Software reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.