Speaker 1: As most of you have already experienced, transcribing audio to text can be tedious, time consuming, and a frustrating exercise because of the numerous errors one commits. You have to listen to the entire audio or video recording and then type out what you hear. You also have to rewind or pause when you miss something and then proofread and edit the text to make sure it all makes sense. All in all, it's quite an effort. What if I told you that you could transcribe your interviews faster, more accurately, with less effort and for free? Introducing Otter.ai, a transcription tool that will save you hours of time and energy and convert your interviews to text with just a couple of clicks. So let's get straight into how to use Otter.ai. We are going to look at two ways that you can use Otter.ai. One, to record and transcribe interviews in real time and two, to transcribe already recorded interviews. So what we are going to do is to go to Google and search for Otter.ai. I'm going to show you how to use this tool to transcribe our interviews in real time. That means you can record and transcribe your interviews at the same time when you are conducting them either in person or through Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet. Now the first thing that you're going to do is I'm going to click on start for free because remember Otter.ai will give us 300 free minutes to transcribe. That means if you are doing an interview for 30 minutes and you only have 10 participants, you can get or you can use this tool for absolutely free and you're going to get your transcripts. If you are doing more than 10 transcripts or more than 10 interviews, then you can consider upgrading. So the first thing I'm going to do is to use a second email here. I'm going to use my this email address and then I'll confirm. So Otter.ai is confirming this account. So I'll get this screen that asks me whether I want to integrate it with my calendar with a video conferencing link or calendar invite guests and then I'll press continue. And then I want to continue with my account. Remember this just signing up and then I want to allow Otter.ai to access my email. So Otter.ai is going to connect my account with Google. So that's then we'll have this screen to streamline your communication. I don't want to connect it with Slack. So let me just click on remind me later. So we are going to get this dashboard here for Otter.ai and then it shows us how to continue or like the different panels we have. Here we have record, import. So record we can record like what I'm saying right now. I can record it as a transcript. So you're going to have a button to record the transcript as you conduct your interviews in either Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. And you can also record if you are conducting your interviews in person. Like what I'm doing right now. I can press record and I can start transcribing this conversation or this tutorial right now. So basically that's what Otter.ai does. It records and transcribes. So we are going to have an audio file and we are going to have a transcript that you are going to get for any conversation that we have. This is a breakthrough tool when you are conducting interviews in qualitative data analysis which means that you don't have to record your audio and then go maybe pay transcribers a lot of money and then or spend six months trying to transcribe your interviews. No you don't have to do that anymore. So what you are going to do here or right now is this is how the tool looks when you open it. These are just tools to integrate with your calendar. But what I want to do is to use this record button because I'm assuming that I'm not doing my interviews over Zoom or Google Meet. I'm assuming I'm doing my interviews in person. Like I have a person I'm interviewing and I've already opened Otter.ai to the browser. So let me record my first conversation. So let's go to record. You can see the record button here and then they will tell me you get 30 minutes of transcription per conversation. Upgrade for more. Yes, that's okay. You can see that Otter.ai is like transcribing what I say right now and it's also recording everything that I say so that I can have an audio where I can go back and check for any mistakes. You can see that this AI is also a very intelligent AI that places periods, commas and other forms of punctuation. So if we have different speakers Otter.ai is going to determine this is speaker one, this is speaker two. And then you can go in there and edit your transcripts so that you can put the names on the speaker one to be maybe the interviewer and the speaker two to be maybe participant one. So this tool will make it easier for you to transcribe your interviews in real time with at least I think 90% or 95% accuracy and I dare say even 99% accuracy. So it's a very accurate AI that does a very good job of transcribing. You can see it's transcribing exactly what I'm saying in this conversation. So let's see how or let's pause and try to listen and do some corrections on this transcript. So I'm going to press the button for stop recording. So Otter.ai will take its time to configure between what I just recorded and the transcript. And now we are going to have my transcript. You can see this is where my transcript is stored and I can click on it and I can listen and check what I just said right now. If we had different speakers, you can see we also have a timestamp. So if you had different speakers, Otter.ai would still differentiate between the different speakers and we are going to get a copy of our audio and a copy of our transcript. So let's try to listen.

Speaker 2: So let's go to record. You can see the record button here

Speaker 1: and then they will tell me you get 30 minutes of transcription per conversation. Upgrade for more. Yes, that's okay. You can see that Otter.ai is like transcribing what I say right now and it's also recording everything that I say so that I can have an audio where I can go back and check for any mistakes. So you can see this tool also understands people with an accent. Of course, I don't have a British accent or probably an American accent but it understands all kinds of accents. As long as you speak in English and you speak with an audible voice, Otter.ai is going to transcribe. Now when we record our audio and get the transcript, we can go to this button here if you check more options and then we can click on this button called export. And now we can export our transcript and our audio. You can see the option for audio here in the format of an mp3. So we are going to get the transcript in the form of txt or docs if you have the pro version, pdf if you have the pro version. So the other options is when you have the pro version but txt is still good for the free version because we can then copy the txt into our document. So I click on export and you can see I get a compressed folder which has one the mp3 file which is what we just recorded here. So let's go to record places period. You can see an mp3 file and a txt note file. You can see this file here is everything that I just spoke about and you can copy this. I click on copy. You can open a word document here and then you can paste and you can see like I have a transcript of what I just said. Before we get back to the video allow me to introduce my services to you. If you are a master's or PhD student doing your thesis or dissertation you might need some help in learning how to perform qualitative data analysis with envivo 14. So feel free to contact me through the contact details down below in the description. Thank you and let's get back to the video. Otter.ai gives you an option to edit your transcripts. So to edit your transcripts before you export you can go to this button here called edit and now you can go and listen to your conversation. And let's say we had a second speaker here. I can put an enter sign and then Otter.ai will be able to differentiate. If I put an enter sign Otter.ai will be able to label that. If this was a second speaker it would be speaker two. And then you can also rename the speakers. Like here you can see speaker name one is Bernard Mugo. I can tag that. And then speaker number two can be participant one or another name. So Otter.ai is going to do all that. Again if this statement was provided by another speaker maybe the participant you can tag that. So you can be able to one record your interviews, two to transcribe and tag the different speakers in a conversation or in your interviews which is the interviewee and the interviewer. So you can tag that into or you can tag that directly in Otter.ai and make the corrections. And if Otter.ai makes a mistake you can go and listen to your audio and then proofread and edit your interviews. And then finally as I showed you earlier you can go and export both the mp3 and a txt and then you can have your files like this. So basically that's what Otter.ai does. And then you can then copy this notepad into a word document ctrl c ctrl v and you can see like Otter.ai can be able to tag the different speakers or the interviewee and the interviewer in a conversation. So that's how to use Otter.ai to record conversations directly. So you can use or you should try to use Otter.ai to record your interviews directly and transcribe them in real time. What you just need is internet connection and then you open this website and you start recording and off you go. Now we have a second group of people. Maybe you have already recorded your interviews and you have the audio or video. So there's still an option for you to use Otter.ai to transcribe your recordings. What we do is again let me click on the home button here by clicking on the logo here and we have this import audio or video file. I'm going to import because I have a free version. I only have three imports. So if you need more maybe you have 20 transcripts. You can check the upgrade to business for unlimited import. To transcribe audio and video we just browse files. This is some audio I recorded. So I'm going to upload it here. So I'm going to give Otter.ai some few minutes to upload my audio files. Otter.ai is transcribing the file. You can see one minute left and also they give me an option of go to transcript. Let me click that option. So you can see Otter.ai has completed the transcription and again we have the option to edit. For example after recording your audio you may want to tag this as or this person as speaker one and this person as maybe you want speaker two or interviewer and interviewee. Otter.ai gives you the option of making the edits inside. As you listen to your audio you make the edits. You make the corrections first but it has a very high accuracy. What you're going to do is mainly to tag the speakers. Maybe the interviewer and interviewee or the interviewer and participant one. Interviewer and participant two. Once you finish proofreading and editing your conversations which are well done and most of the punctuation is done. Most of like we have capitalization. We have sentences. It has a very clear transcript. Once all this is done and you have tagged your interviewer and interviewee then you can go to export and download the transcript in notepad format and you can see this is the transcript and then I can control all and I can copy here. Again I can put this in word or leave it in text. So again I can paste this. Basically that's what Otter.ai does for you. Sometimes even tagging the speakers is not that important. You just need to get your interviews into Otter.ai and transcribe them directly. You don't waste so much time trying to tag your speakers. No. That's the second way of using Otter.ai which is transcribing your interview recordings which might be audio or video. Now that you understand how to transcribe your interviews with ease watch this video that teaches you how to analyze interviews using a Google.