interviewScribe for Pc

I am in an immersion-based Spanish language learning program in Mexico. I have hours and hours of raw language data in the form of digital texts and stories of varying lengths. Part of my studies incudes transcribing many these texts and stories for analysis. I have to transcibe the data myself, so that I am clearly understanding every single word in the text. I then check my transcriptions with a live language helper. Before I would just use iTunes to transcribe the texts, but I was always getting behind and having to rewind and try to find where I left off because I couldn’t type fast enough. This meant a lot of wasted time. So this program has been awesome for my goals. It has saved me a ton of time. The only thing I would change is to add a “loop” feature that allows the segment to keep repeating itself for the times I cannot type fast enough or when I need to hear it over and over to discern what is being said. Anyways, its the best app I have encourntered for my needs.

This app is a bit rough around the edges, but it does what I need at a great price. I am not into any professional level transcribing, but I have hours of interviews of my relatives I would like to transcribe. It's been fun for me to go back and listen to a recording of someone I love who has passed away and type out their stories for my kids and others to enjoy. Sure, there are things that can be improved, but this app does that pretty well.

I thought this was going to be a good app - until I found out they never finished the Export feature. All you can do is add in text into their proprietary format, and that’s it. In the User Guide it says you can export to .TXT, and there is even an Export feature in the File pull down menu. YET YOU CANNOT EXPORT ANYTHING. I am amazed that this hasn’t been puled off the App store for false advertising and fraudulent practices. Save your money and time - don’t purchase this app!

This should be considered a beta version of something that may be useful someday. There is some thought here about what transcribing an interview might require, like breaking the audio track into phrases so they can be efficiently transcribed. That's all OK. But there is no way to export the transcript to any other format. You can only save files in an this app-specific format and that renders it useless. It should output to a .csv and .txt file so the data you generate can be used without having to copy and paste the text you wrote phrase by phrase and having to add time stamps and speaker IDs in the new file yourself. The author also hints at the ability to use Mountain Lion's dictation functionality to do the transcription, but don't get excited. It's hard to figure out how he thinks that works from the extremely brief instructions available, but it appears the intent is that you play a phrase then dictate it yourself into the system mic for transcription. There is no way to have the software feed phrases to the system input for dictation to decode. Besides, my tests with Mountain Lion's dication system show that even a broadcast-quality interview recording is not transcribed in any useful way. And it can only handle a few seconds at a time no matter what the source.