How to Transcribe an Interview: Manual, Software and AI Options Compared

A transcript turns an interview into something you can search, quote and compare. Recruiters use transcripts to check what a candidate actually said, researchers use them for analysis, and journalists use them to quote accurately.

There are three ways to transcribe an interview: by hand, through a service, or with software. Which one fits depends on how accurate the transcript must be and how much time you have. For many interviews, you may not need a full transcript at all.

Before you start: record well and get consent

Transcription quality depends on recording quality. A few rules save hours later:

• Ask for consent at the start. Say that you are recording, why, and who will see the recording. Several US states require the consent of everyone on the call, and in the EU and the UK a recording is personal data that needs a legal basis and a clear notice.
• Use a separate audio track per person where you can. Video call platforms and some recorders support this. It makes speaker labels much more accurate.
• Reduce noise. Headsets beat laptop microphones; a quiet room beats a café.
• State names and spellings early. Ask the interviewee to spell their name and any company or product names.

Option 1: Transcribe by hand

You listen to the recording and type what you hear.

• Time: typically several hours of work for each hour of audio, depending on typing speed, accents and audio quality.
• When it makes sense: short interviews, sensitive material that cannot leave your computer, or audio that software handles badly.
• How to do it faster: use a player with keyboard shortcuts to pause and rewind, slow playback down slightly, and type in short bursts.

Option 2: Use a transcription service

You upload the audio and a person, or software checked by a person, returns a transcript.

• Time: from hours to a few days.
• When it makes sense: research and legal work that need high accuracy and full verbatim, or difficult audio with many speakers.
• Watch for: confidentiality terms, where the audio is stored, and whether the service uses your data for anything else.

Option 3: Use speech-to-text software or an AI note taker

Automatic speech recognition turns the recording into text in minutes. AI note takers go further: they join the call, transcribe it while it happens, label the speakers and write a summary.

• Time: minutes, plus your review.
• When it makes sense: most business, hiring and user-research interviews.
• Watch for: names, numbers, technical terms and overlapping speech. Always review the transcript before you quote from it.

How to format an interview transcript

A consistent format makes a transcript easy to scan and quote:

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Interview: [Topic or role]
Date:                 Duration:
Interviewer:          Interviewee:
Recording consent: yes, given at 00:00

[00:00] INTERVIEWER: Thanks for joining. Before we start, ...
[00:42] INTERVIEWEE: Sure. I've been leading the night shift for ...
[03:15] INTERVIEWER: What exactly did you change in the handover?
[03:20] INTERVIEWEE: I moved it to a written checklist with three sections ...

Four decisions to make before you start:

1. Verbatim or clean verbatim. Verbatim keeps every "um", repetition and false start. Clean verbatim removes them but keeps the meaning. Hiring interviews usually use clean verbatim; research and legal interviews often need full verbatim.
2. Speaker labels. Use roles or names consistently. Start a new paragraph every time the speaker changes.
3. Timestamps. Add one at every speaker change, or every 30 to 60 seconds in long answers, so you can find the moment in the recording.
4. Unclear passages. Mark them, for example [inaudible 12:04], instead of guessing.

Do you need a full transcript?

Often not. A full transcript is long, and few people read it. For a hiring interview, what the team needs is evidence for each criterion: what the candidate said about the things that matter for the role, with the moment they said it. The full transcript stays available for checking.

That is how Firstview's AI note taker works. It joins Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams calls from your calendar or a link, transcribes each speaker separately so names stay right, and turns the conversation into notes in the template you choose, from an interview scorecard to a meeting notes template. For job interviews, the notes are filed on the candidate's record.

Whichever method you choose, review the result before you share it, and keep the recording only as long as you need it.