"87 interviews, 43 hours total, transcribed in a single weekend. My methodology section got its life back."
Sound familiar?
Interview work is hard. Transcribing it shouldn't be.
Four reasons you're reading this page at 11pm.
The tape pile keeps growing.
Twenty-seven hours of qualitative interviews. A looming defense date. Your thumbs already hurt from the transcription pedal and you haven’t even started coding.
Per-minute pricing is eating your budget.
Rev charges $1.50 a minute. An hour of interviews costs more than your lunch stipend for the week. Multiply that by every participant and the grant doesn’t stretch.
Free AI tools mangle your quotes.
You need the exact words — names, dates, jargon, pauses. Free tools hallucinate speakers, drop sentences, and turn 'Dr. Okonkwo' into 'Doctor Okanagan.'
Your sources trusted you with their voice.
You promised confidentiality. You can’t upload their recordings to a tool that trains on your files, resells them, or stores them forever.
Typist was built with interview work in mind. Here's what that actually means.
Built for the way interviews work
Not another general-purpose transcriber.
Citations, search, exports to qualitative tools, and the privacy promise your sources deserve.
Timestamps you can cite.
Every sentence carries an exact timestamp. Quote a participant with confidence. Cite the precise moment in your footnote or show notes.
Search 40 hours in one click.
Coding is matching. Typist's full-transcript search catches every mention of 'work-life balance' across your whole corpus — in seconds.
Exports your analysis tools read.
TXT for NVivo, DOCX for Atlas.ti, SRT for video editors, PDF for coauthors. Typist plays nicely with the tools qualitative work actually runs on.
Your source stays yours.
Files are deleted when you say so. We don’t train AI on your data. We don’t resell it. Your participants stay protected — exactly like you promised.
How it works
Record. Transcribe. Cite.
From field tape to coded theme in three steps.
Upload your recording
Drop an MP3, WAV, M4A, or MP4 — field recorder, Zoom export, phone memo. Up to 5 GB on Premium.
Typist transcribes
~30 seconds for a 1-hour interview. 99+ languages. Handles technical terms, crosstalk, and heavy accents.
Cite, code, or quote
Timestamped transcript ready for NVivo, Atlas.ti, Dovetail, your footnotes, or your editor's inbox.
See it for yourself
Four real interview formats.
Journalism, qualitative research, UX study, oral history. Press play and hover to reveal timestamps.
Let's talk about the decision to open-source the project. What was the reasoning behind it? Honestly, it was pragmatic. We were a tiny team competing against companies with hundreds of engineers. Open source was our distribution strategy. And it worked — within six months we had contributors from Google, Meta, and Amazon opening pull requests against our repo. That kind of validation you can’t buy. It changed everything about how we thought about the business.
Why Typist
Accurate. Fast. Private.
Exactly what serious interview work needs — nothing it doesn't.
Done before the audio uploads. 200x faster than real-time. A 1-hour interview in ~30 seconds.
Every interview language. 99+ languages, code-switching, heavy accents, technical vocabulary.
Any recording format. Field recorder, Zoom, phone memo, video file. Up to 5 GB per file.
Drag and drop audio/video file
MP3, WAV, MP4, MOV, M4A and more...
Plays nice with your analysis tools. TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT → NVivo, Atlas.ti, Dovetail, Avid, Premiere.
In good company
Reporters. Researchers. Producers. Historians.
From Oxford to Yale, The Atlantic to Duolingo.
"Interview to coded theme in 15 minutes. What used to take me a full day of pausing, rewinding, and typing. Typist gave me back a day a week and our research velocity doubled."
"It handles whispers, crosstalk, and French all at once. Quotes land clean — proper nouns, place names, the lot. I stopped dreading the transcription step entirely."
"87 interviews, 43 hours total, transcribed in a single weekend. My methodology section got its life back. I finished coding in NVivo a month ahead of schedule."
"I produce a 45-minute weekly interview show. Typist gives me the transcript by the time I’m uploading the audio. Show notes write themselves. Best workflow upgrade I’ve made in years."
"I’m preserving testimony in Croatian and English, sometimes in the same sentence. Typist caught every word my grandmother said. I sat in my kitchen and cried a little reading the transcript."
"72 hours of field interviews for a feature-length doc. Typist’s SRT export dropped straight into Avid without a cleanup pass. It saved us two weeks of post."
How we compare
Typist vs the interview-transcription roster.
Faster than Rev. Cheaper than Trint. More languages than Otter.
| Tool | Speed | Max upload | Languages | Free tier | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Typist | 1hr in ~30s | 5 GB | 99+ | 3 free, no card | $20/mo unlimited |
Rev | 1hr in ~5 min (AI) | 2 GB | 17 | None | $0.25–$1.50/min |
Trint | 1hr in ~4 min | 1 GB | 40+ | None | $52/mo per seat |
Descript | 1hr in ~3 min | 1 GB | 23 | 1 hr/mo | $15/mo (Creator) |
Sonix | 1hr in ~5 min | 500 MB | 53 | 30 min trial | $10/hr or $22/mo |
Otter.ai | Real-time | ~3 GB | 3 | 300 min/mo | $16.99/mo (Pro) |
Pricing
Flat monthly. No per-minute fees.
Start free. Upgrade when your project outgrows it.
3 interviews free. No credit card, no trial countdown.
3 free interviews
No credit card required
Files up to 100 MB
Plenty for a 1-2 hour interview
Turbo transcription model
Fast and accurate
TXT + DOCX exports
Paste into your analysis tool
7-day retention
Files auto-delete after a week
Unlimited interviews. 5 GB files. Every export format.
Unlimited interviews
No monthly caps or per-minute fees
Up to 5 GB per file
Full-day sessions & multi-hour field work
Priority processing
Skip the queue on deadlines
All export formats
NVivo, Atlas.ti, Dovetail, Avid — everything
All languages & models
99+ languages, highest-accuracy models
Your files, your control
Keep forever or delete on command
Questions
Everything interview teams ask.
Stop transcribing. Start writing.
Drop your next interview recording and get a print-ready transcript in the time it takes to brew coffee. Free to start, no credit card.
Up to 5 GB per file · 99+ languages · Your source stays yours