Academic transcription that keeps your data local
Qualitative research runs on recordings: interviews, focus groups, oral histories. Turning them into transcripts is unavoidable, and for most people the default is to upload the audio to a transcription website and wait. For a researcher, that upload is often the exact thing their ethics approval does not allow.
talat transcribes on your own machine, so the recording never leaves it. What comes back is an ordinary transcript that knows who said what, ready to code, with nothing sent to a third party in the process.
Consent usually names the cloud as the problem.
Participant consent forms and institutional review boards routinely specify how recordings may be stored and who may access them, and “uploaded to a commercial cloud service for processing” is frequently outside what a participant agreed to. Getting a fast transcript should not mean quietly breaching the promise you made to the people who trusted you with their words.
Because talat does the transcription on your computer, the audio stays where your protocol expects it: on your machine, under your control, never copied to a vendor you would then have to name in an amendment.
Interviews, ready to analyse.
Drop in a recorded interview or capture one live, and talat transcribes the whole thing locally, separates the speakers, and labels each turn. It handles long recordings comfortably faster than sitting through them, works offline, and keeps every transcript in a searchable local library, which is useful when a study runs to dozens of interviews.
You can import audio you already have, so a back catalogue of recordings can be transcribed without any of it going online. The guide to transcribing an audio file walks through that path.
More on how this works.
For the mechanics, see how on-device transcription works, and the other professions with the same requirement are on the use-case overview.
10 hours free, no account.
Download talat and use every feature with 10 hours of free recording time; no account or payment needed.