How to Transcribe an Interview

Researchers, journalists, and content creators use speech-to-text to convert interview recordings into readable text. Having a written record makes it easy to search for specific quotes, verify facts, and pull highlights for articles or reports.

Turning audio to text streamlines the review process, allowing you to visually scan a document rather than scrubbing through a media timeline to find what a person said.

Before you transcribe audio with Konthora, you must prepare the recording to meet the platform limits. Konthora accepts media up to 100 MB and up to 10 minutes in duration.

Longer interviews must be divided into shorter files before upload. Konthora supports standard audio inputs (MP3, WAV, M4A, AAC) as well as video inputs (MP4, WebM, MOV).

Note that audio transcription accuracy depends heavily on the clarity of the recording. Clear audio with minimal overlapping speech will produce a more accurate transcript.

Konthora provides three timestamp modes: sentence, paragraph, and word-level.

When reviewing an interview, paragraph mode is often the best choice for readability as it groups longer thoughts together. Sentence mode provides precise timecode references if you need to trace a specific quote back to the original media. Word-level timestamps are primarily used when syncing text to video edits.

Once the transcript is ready, you must choose an export format that fits your workflow.

For most review and archiving purposes, TXT is the easiest format to open and read. If you plan to caption a video interview, you can export as SRT or VTT. A JSON file is also available for structured programmatic access to the timestamp data.