Interview Transcription for Qualitative Research: Verbatim Rigor, Speaker Coding & CAQDAS Export

1. Strict Verbatim vs. Clean Read — Zero Unwanted Summarization

Generic AI meeting assistants condense an hour of fieldwork into bullet points, destroying the empirical material required for thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke), grounded theory, or discourse analysis. Le Scribe Audio processes up to 10 continuous hours and 10 GB per recording in two sequential acoustic passes while preserving 100% of spoken turns from the first second to the last:

• Strict Verbatim Mode: Retains filler words, hesitations, repetitions, and self-corrections for sociolinguistic, clinical, and fine-grained qualitative coding.
• Clean Read Mode: Gently removes pure vocal disfluencies and stutters to improve readability in dissertations and research reports without ever summarizing or paraphrasing the interviewee's words.

2. 1-Click Diarization Speaker Coding & Realistic Proofreading Time

In the interactive browser studio, every paragraph is acoustically linked to the recording: click any word to hear that exact moment with [hh:mm:ss] precision. From the speaker bar, you can rename and code every speaker label globally in 1 click — for example replacing Mr. Bernard (41) and Ms. Smith (38) with Interviewer (41) and Participant P1 (38) across all turns simultaneously.

Methodological note on pseudonymization: Coding speaker labels updates the diarization headers only; proper names of institutions, colleagues, or towns spoken inside sentences must still be checked by the researcher. Instead of spending 4 to 7 hours typing 1 hour of audio from scratch, a full human re-listening and pseudonymization pass on our 2-pass draft takes 2 to 3 hours per hour of audio — dividing your transcription workload by 2.

3. Exporting to Word (.docx), NVivo, MAXQDA, ATLAS.ti & IRaMuTeQ

Export your transcript as a standard 100% editable Microsoft Word (.docx) file featuring bold speaker headers, optional timestamps, optional continuous line numbering for seminar citation, and an optional on-demand 1-click overview (consisting of an executive summary followed by a chrono-thematic breakdown). Every exported Word file includes a transparent footer notice (“Transcription generated by artificial intelligence on lescribeaudio.com, human verification is recommended”) and can be freely formatted to your university or journal guidelines after review.

For lexicometric and textual statistics workflows in IRaMuTeQ, Alceste, or TXM, clean speaker turns can be exported into plain UTF-8 text without BOM and paired with our open-source MIT library srt-vtt-cleaner-fr (CERN/Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.24087394) to prevent character-splitting errors.

4. Dual-Transcriber Human Proofreading (€60 excl. VAT/h) & Ethics Board Compliance

Working under tight ANR, ERC, Horizon Europe, or departmental deadlines? On French-language corpora, you can order our Human Proofreading option at €60 excl. VAT per hour of audio (€1.00 excl. VAT/min), where two successive human transcribers re-listen to the entire recording for cross-checked accuracy. All files are stored encrypted in France at OVHcloud (AES-256), processed via Google Cloud Vertex AI (Europe region, Zero Data Retention), and erasable in 1 click to satisfy your Data Management Plan (DMP).