Typing out an hour-long interview by hand is a special kind of misery — figure four to six hours of it. AI transcription turns that into a few minutes plus a short cleanup pass. Here's how to get an accurate transcript, and the things that quietly wreck accuracy if you ignore them.
Upload — and mind the audio quality
MP3, WAV, M4A, and MP4 all work. Accuracy tracks with recording quality: a lapel mic in a quiet room comes out near-perfect, while a phone across a noisy café needs more editing. Today's models handle crosstalk and accents far better than they did a couple of years ago, but garbage in still means cleanup out.
Lean on language and speaker detection
A good tool auto-detects the spoken language (90+ of them) and can label speakers, so a two-person interview comes back as separate speakers instead of one undifferentiated block. That labeling alone saves most of the editing time.
The cleanup pass
Skim for proper nouns, jargon, and acronyms — that's where models guess. Budget maybe 10-15% of the recording's length for review. It's dramatically faster than transcribing from scratch, and you end up with text you can paste straight into a document.
Get more out of the transcript
Beyond the record itself, transcripts are great raw material: turn a podcast into a blog post and show notes, generate subtitles, pull quotes, or just make your video content searchable. It's an accessibility win too.