For a thesis, a dissertation or a funded qualitative study, the transcript is the data. Coding happens on the text, quotes in the write-up come from the text, and a supervisor or a reviewer who wants to check an interpretation goes back to the text. That is why researchers want a verbatim transcript with timestamps rather than a summary: every utterance needs to be there, in order, and findable in the recording.
Transcrify produces exactly that. Each segment carries a timestamp, the interviewer and the participant are labelled and kept apart through the whole conversation, and the text comes out as a dialogue rather than one block. The same output serves UX researchers running user interviews, where the goal is to pull observations and quotes into a findings deck quickly, and journalists who need an accurate record of what a source said and when.
Qualitative analysis software works best with plain text, and the TXT download available with a free account imports directly into NVivo, ATLAS.ti and MAXQDA. The speaker labels survive the import, which means the auto-coding by speaker that these tools offer works out of the box, and the timestamps let you link a coded passage back to the exact moment in the audio when you need to hear the tone as well as the words.
Before the transcript goes into analysis, most ethics protocols require anonymisation: replacing names of people, employers and places with codes. That step belongs to the researcher, because only you know what counts as identifying in your study. The editor in a free account is built for this pass. Search finds every mention of a name, the replacement takes a moment, and the corrected version is what you download.
Two people on a single recorder in a quiet room transcribe very well, and the speaker labels will be consistent from start to finish. Remote interviews recorded in Zoom, Meet or Teams also come out cleanly, because each participant has their own microphone. The passages to check afterwards are the ones where both people talk at once, or where a participant drops to a whisper for something sensitive; those are also the passages a careful researcher would listen to again anyway.
The language is detected automatically and more than fifty languages are supported, so interviews conducted in the participant’s language, or switching between languages, need no settings. Translation of the transcript is a separate step and is not part of the transcription itself.
Ethics applications increasingly ask where recordings are processed and whether they are shared with other companies. Transcrify runs its own speech models on its own servers, and the audio you upload is not forwarded to a third-party speech API. That is a short, clear answer to put in a data management plan. Interviews transcribed here as a guest are handled the same way, and they move into a free account if you create one later, so nothing has to be uploaded twice.
The free limit is 3 hours per recording and 10 recordings without an account, which covers a pilot study. A free account adds 5 hours across 10 files, an editor, a history and TXT, SRT, VTT and ASS downloads. AI chat with an interview, automatic summaries and PDF or Word export are part of the paid plans.