Interview transcription that gets you to the quote faster

Stop retyping interviews

Transcribing by hand commonly takes about four times the length of the recording. An hour-long interview is an afternoon of pausing, rewinding and typing, before you've written a single line of the story. Deshifr usually has the full transcript ready in minutes, so the afternoon goes into reporting.

Automatic transcription isn't perfect, and Deshifr doesn't pretend to be: names, jargon and crosstalk can come out wrong. That is why every sentence keeps its timecode. You read the transcript, and wherever a line matters, you click it and listen to the original. Quotes stay accurate without listening to the whole recording again.

Built for how stories get edited

• Read-only links for editors. Share the transcript with timecodes; the recording stays private to you unless you tick "Include the recording" for that link. Your editor can read it in the browser or download it as a text file.
• Who said what. Each change of speaker is labelled; click a label to name the speaker, and the name follows every turn of theirs into the shared page and the export.
• Switch sharing off any time. Turning a link off makes it stop working at once. Turn sharing on again and you get a new link, so the old one can't be reopened.
• Export with timecodes. Download any transcript as a .txt file with a [mm:ss] timecode on every sentence, ready to paste into your notes or CMS, or as .srt/.vtt subtitles for a video story.
• Interviews in other languages. Foreign-language sources, fixers' recordings, local radio: choose the language per upload, from Ukrainian and English to Japanese.
• Delete when you're done. Deleting a transcript removes its text, its share link and the recording itself.

Your recordings stay yours

Sources trust you with what they say on tape. Uploads are private to your account: nobody else can play them, and a shared transcript includes the audio only if you choose to add it to that link. Shared transcripts are hidden from search engines. What happens to your files, and who processes them, is set out in our Privacy Policy.