Unless you were born waaaay back in the olden days, back when horses and wagons were still favored over cars, then there’s no need for you to be manually transcribing your interviews and meetings. In today’s day and age, you can get an easy-to-use interview transcriber to do the job for you.
Oh, and a lot of these are free!
What is a Transcribed Interview?
A transcribed interview is a written version of everything that happened in the interview. It provides an accurate account of all ideas discussed and action points mentioned.
In the past, when meetings were still held face-to-face, there would usually be someone taking meeting minutes and then writing them up into a transcript afterwards.
Nowadays, you can choose from a number of free interview transcribers to get automatically generated transcripts instantly.
But what’s the best interview transcription service?
How to Transcribe an Interview: 4 Effective Methods
Transcribing an interview can be a time-consuming but essential task, whether you’re a journalist, researcher, or business professional. A well-structured transcription helps capture key insights, ensures accuracy, and makes information easily searchable. Fortunately, there are several ways to transcribe an interview, ranging from manual methods to advanced AI-powered tools:
- Manual Transcription – The most precise method, but also the most time-intensive. This involves listening to the recording and typing everything word-for-word. While it ensures accuracy, it can take four to six hours per hour of audio.
- Using Speech-to-Text Software – Tools like Otter.ai, Sonix, or Rev offer automated transcriptions with decent accuracy. However, background noise, accents, and multiple speakers can sometimes lead to errors, requiring manual corrections.
- Hiring a Professional Transcription Service – If you need highly accurate transcripts without doing the work yourself, professional transcription services like Rev.com or GoTranscript provide human-generated transcriptions for a fee. This is ideal for legal, academic, or corporate interviews where precision matters.
- Using a Meeting Transcriber – The easiest and most efficient option is to use an AI-powered meeting transcriber. These tools automatically transcribe interviews in real-time and generate summaries, making them perfect for professionals who need quick and accurate transcripts with minimal effort.
Choosing the right method depends on your time, budget, and accuracy requirements—but for speed and convenience, using a meeting transcriber is often the best solution.
5 Simple and Free Meeting Transcribers
If you’re looking for a fast and reliable way to transcribe your interviews, meeting transcribers powered by AI can save you time and effort. These tools automatically convert speech into text, making it easy to review, edit, and share transcripts. Whether you’re conducting journalistic interviews, business meetings, or academic research, these transcribers can help streamline your workflow.
Here are five top meeting transcribers for interviews:
- tl;dv
- Happyscribe
- Tactiq
- Fireflies
- Otter
1. tl;dv – records both video and audio on the free plan.
tl;dv stands out from the rest of the meeting transcription tools on this list because it records both video and audio. Not only does it provide transcripts in more than 25 languages, but it also lets you rewatch the visual aspect of the meeting itself, which can be used in a variety of ways. It’s particularly excellent for user researchers and product teams. It can also be a fantastic way to rewatch potential candidates applying for jobs.
Recording video is not the only thing that separates tl;dv from the rest of the list. tl;dv offers unlimited free recordings and transcripts. On top of that, tl;dv boasts a whole range of other features – like timestamping, tagging, clip reels, AI-based summaries, and a powerful search engine for finding past meeting moments. You can even get the AI to make notes for you throughout the call.
tl;dv only takes a few minutes to get set up too, meaning you can be recording videos and creating transcripts today! And there’s absolutely no commitment to paying anything either. There is a paid option for professional teams that want to maximize the benefits of their transcriptions, but the vast majority of tl;dv’s features are completely free.
And that free plan is free forever. Guaranteed.
Why should you choose tl;dv to transcribe interviews
- Records, transcribes, and recognizes speakers in both Google Meet & Zoom calls
- Accurate speaker recognition
- Top of the range AI
- Makes recordings and transcripts accessible as soon as the meeting ends
- Timestamp moments during the live meeting to jump back to that moment whenever you want
- Automatic speaker labels in transcription
- Searchable transcriptions in 25+ languages
- Create clips and reels out of longer recordings with such ease that it physically hurts to think about not doing it that way
- Integrates directly with Slack, Salesforce, Notion and all your research repository tools
- Smooth and easy onboarding
- Intuitive, easy-to-use, and scalable across your entire organization
- Best freemium plan in the industry, allowing for unlimited recordings and transcripts, plus tons of other free features
- Coming soon: automated labeling of meetings, according to your internal tagging system (a feature powered by GPT-3 – just one of its many use cases for product managers!)
Why tl;dv may not be the best to transcribe interviews
- Not available for MS Teams, Skype, or Webex (yet!)
tl;dv offers a generous free plan
With a free plan to make your eyes water, you can try out tl;dv today with no strings attached. And depending on which region of the world you’re in, you can get up to a 40% discount on the paid plans!
Free Plan Features
- Unlimited recordings
- Record Google Meet and Zoom
- Transcribe Google Meets and Zoom calls
- Transcribe in 20+ languages
- Set timestamps and highlights
- Create and share clips
- Set recording automations
The paid plans offer more integrations, analytics, downloadable recordings, customizable share settings, as well as priority customer support.
How to Transcribe Interviews with tl;dv
Virtual Interviews
If you’re having a virtual interview on Google Meet or Zoom, then tl;dv can enter the meeting as a bot participant. It will sit quietly in the background, but it will record everything that happens. As soon as the meeting ends, you’ll get an email with the full transcript and video recording. You can also search for it in your tl;dv meeting library, making tl;dv a research repository of sorts if you’re running user interviews in particular.
Pre-Recorded Meetings
If you held your meeting in person and recorded it that way, you can still use tl;dv to transcribe it. Follow these steps to transcribe your meeting audio today:
1. Create an account on tldv.io
2. Select target language
3. Click on “Upload Video”
4. Choose your file and wait until it’s processed
5. Receive a transcript and an AI summary of the video
2. Happyscribe
Happyscribe is a combination of state-of-the-art AI and language experts. This makes it one of the ultimate meeting and interview transcribers. Available in a whopping 60+ languages, Happyscribe is a fantastic tool that’s used by BBC, United Nations, and Forbes. It has everything you need to go from interview to written transcript.
With their interactive editors, endless possibilities are available to the user. Its intuitive design makes working with subtitles and transcripts a whole lot easier.
Happyscribe is also super simple to share in more than 10 formats. Just one click, in fact.
Why choose Happyscribe to transcribe interviews
- APIs and integrations so you can seamlessly connect with your favorite applications
- Fantastic AI
- Intuitive interface and easy to share
- Available in 60+ languages
- More accurate transcriptions than the average transcription tool
- Speaker recognition
- 99% accuracy guaranteed for human-made transcriptions and subtitles
Where Happyscribe interview transcription falls short
- Only a free trial with limited accuracy
- Expensive plans for human translations
- No video recording
Happyscribe Pricing
As Happyscribe focuses mostly on human translation, the rate is per minute of audio. There are automated versions which are still said to be 85% accurate (more than most of the tools on this list), but the automated version is fairly limited, and you still have to pay for subtitles.
Free Trial Features
- $0.20 per minute for subtitles
- 85% accuracy
- Takes 50% of the audio length to complete
3. Tactiq
Tactiq.io is an easy-to-use interview transcriber that allows you to keep your head in the meeting while it automatically makes notes on your behalf. When your meeting ends, it’ll present you with a full transcript which you can easily export to your work platform of choice.
By integrating with OpenAI, Tactiq empowers you to simplify and streamline the transcript, helping you avoid tedious follow-ups and cluttered transcripts.
Translatable into 5 languages, Tactiq transcripts have a high accuracy percentage, meaning you can rely on it to pick up your entire conversation with minimal errors. This is super important as many interview transcribers frequently make mistakes.
While Tactiq sounds like an impressive meeting transcription tool (and it is!), it should be noted that their free plan is not quite up to scratch with our number one spot’s…
Where Tactiq is great for interview transcriptions
- Works on Google Meet, Zoom, MS Teams, and Webex
- Dozens of powerful integrations, including Salesforce and Confluence
- Identifies speakers
- AI summaries
- Easy to use
- Quick set up
Where Tactiq needs to improve
- Only translates into 5 languages
- Doesn’t record video
- Limited free plan
Tactiq Pricing
While Tactiq does have a decent free plan, it’s not quite up to scratch as some of the other tools on this list. The first plan is $8 per month, while a more comprehensive one is $16.
Free Plan Features
- 10/mo meeting
- 5 AI credits
- Time-stamped notes
- Basic integrations
- Speaker identification
- Highlights
- Save in-call chat
- Meeting Engagement
4. Fireflies.ai
Fireflies is a well-known meeting and interview transcriber. The platform offers AI-powered note-taking and meeting organization, making it a useful tool for teams looking to streamline their workflow.
One of its standout features is its search function, which helps users quickly review key moments in a recorded meeting. Fireflies also allows users to create a searchable library of meeting transcripts, providing a centralized space for collaboration and reference. While it offers solid transcription capabilities, its effectiveness—like most AI tools—may vary based on audio quality and speaker clarity
Fireflies’s strengths
- Salesforce integration
- Records, transcribes and analyzes voice conversations
- AI-powered search function
- Good for team collaboration
- Available on Google Meet, Zoom, MS Teams and more
Fireflies drawbacks
- No video recording on the free plan
- No speaker recognition
- Limited free plan
Fireflies Pricing
The paid plans for Fireflies.ai start at $10 per month per user (when billed annually). They offer a free plan too. Unfortunately though, for video recording, you need the Business Plan at $19.99 per month.
Free Plan Features
- Limited transcription credits
- 800 mins of storage
- Record on Zoom, Google Meet, MS Teams, and more
- Search within meetings
- Different playback speeds
- Comments and reactions
- Clip out moments and soundbites
- Uploads
- 3 public channels
5. Otter.ai
Otter.ai is a text-to-speech interview transcriber that you must have already heard of. In real-time, it transcribes audio from virtual meetings so that you have a full transcript by the time you’re finished.
Otter also allows you to add timestamps, highlights and other edits to the transcription, then share it with your colleagues to align collaborative efforts and cut down on unnecessary meetings.
The software is widely used by journalists, media teams, and universities, but it’s not the first choice among remote or async work teams, and not firmly established in the realm of Product or UX.
One of the downsides is that Otter.ai’s transcription service is only available in English. That number seems miniscule when compared with tl;dv’s transcriptions, for example, which are available in more than 25 languages, free of charge. You can even instantly translate a transcript from one language to another using tl;dv (also free of charge!)
Pros
- Easy to use
- Includes timestamps, highlights, edits and transcription services
- Search transcripts by keyword
Cons
- Transcriptions only available in English
- Doesn’t record video
- No speaker recognition
Pricing
The paid plans for Otter.ai start at $8.33 per month when billed annually. They also have a business plan for $20 per month. Both are great plans, well-equipped with a variety of features, and there’s also a free plan for everybody.
Free Plan Features
- Record and transcribe your meetings in real time
- Otter Assistant joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet to automatically take and share notes, even if you can’t join the meeting
- Takeaways and Automated Summary
- 300 monthly transcription minutes; 30 minutes per conversation
What is the best interview transcriber?
Determining the best interview transcriber depends on your specific needs, such as accuracy, cost, integration capabilities, and additional features.
tl;dv stands out with its video recording and unlimited free transcription services, making it a strong contender for those seeking comprehensive features at no cost.
If Free is not an issue and you’re willing to pay for great features, check out our list of the best interview transcription software – all you need to get started.
