Listen before you publish
Click any line to hear that exact moment in the audio. Written text loses hesitation, sarcasm, and emphasis. Listening to the delivery keeps you from publishing a quote that is word-for-word right but misses the point.
Interview transcription
The quote you need is two hours in, and you have four more interviews to go.
Built for journalists, academic researchers, and UX or market research teams working through a stack of sessions.
Live demo
Runs in your browser.
KolWrite turns interviews into searchable text with speaker labels and timestamps, and lets you replay any line before you quote it.
- Verbatimeditable text rather than a paraphrase
- Timestampsjump straight to any quote
- Speaker IDinterviewer and participant kept separate
- 100+languages, with translation between them
You can only use a quote if you can find it again
Interview work is not about producing text. It is about being able to return to a specific thing a specific person said, and being sure they said it that way.
Keep speakers separate
Speaker separation splits the interviewer from the participant. If a leading question gets merged into the participant's answer, it changes the meaning of your data.
Search the conversation
Search the transcript for a specific term, product name, or phrase instead of scrubbing through the audio. When you find the line, the timestamp is right there for your citation.
Ask questions about the session
Use chat to find where a theme comes up in the transcript, or generate a summary of the session to see which parts need a closer read.
You rarely do fieldwork at a desk
You might record a research interview in a café, on a doorstep, in a lab, or over a bad phone connection. Your tools have to handle all of those.
Record wherever you are
Record on a phone, laptop, or tablet. If a conversation starts before you can pull out a device, you can start recording from an Apple Watch. The Wear OS version has not been released.
Let participants speak their own language
You get better answers when people speak the language they think in. You can transcribe in 100+ languages and translate between supported languages, so team members who don't speak the participant's language can still use the material.
Upfront about difficult audio
Background noise, distance from the microphone and people finishing each other's sentences degrade any transcription. The verify-against-audio step exists precisely because the difficult passages are the ones worth checking.
Protecting participant privacy
We encrypt your recordings and transcripts, and we never use your content to train AI models. That matters when your consent form promises participants exactly how their words will be handled.
Turn a folder of recordings into material you can analyze
Record or upload
Upload field recordings, call audio, or video sessions, or record the interview straight in the app.
Get a structured transcript
Instead of a wall of text, you get an editable transcript broken down by speaker and timestamp.
Read and check
Read through the transcript, fix names and specialized terms once, and listen back to any part you plan to quote.
Analyze and export
Search, summarize, and ask questions about the transcript. When you are ready, export it to Word or plain text to code and analyze in your team's usual software.
Questions
Can I quote directly from the transcript?
Think of the transcript as a fast, searchable draft of the recording instead of a final record. Before you publish a quote or put it into your findings, click the line and listen to it. That simple habit will catch a misheard name, a dropped negative, or a sentence that sounds different from how it reads.
Does it label the interviewer and the participant separately?
Yes. Speaker separation breaks the conversation down by voice and adds timestamps. A one-on-one interview with decent mic placement separates cleanly. A five-person focus group where people talk over each other is tougher, so you will want to review those sections yourself.
Can I run research with participants who speak another language?
Yes. KolWrite transcribes in 100+ languages and translates between supported languages. Participants can answer in their own language, and your team can read and analyze the sessions in theirs. We recommend keeping the original transcript next to the translation whenever the exact meaning is debated.
Is my interview audio used to train models?
No. We do not train AI models on your content, and all recordings and transcripts are encrypted. If you are working under ethics board approval or a signed consent form, you can find the details you need on our security and privacy page.
Can I get transcripts into my analysis software?
You can export the transcript as a Word document or plain text file and import it into whatever qualitative analysis tool your team uses for coding. The timestamps stay in the text, so your coded excerpts still point back to the exact moment in the audio.
Start with the interview you keep putting off.
Upload the longest recording from your study and see how fast you can find the three minutes you actually need.