Recording and Transcribing Interviews
If you're doing an interview where there's a lot of information about to be shared, and/or you need to make sure you can quote people accurately, you might want to record it. To do so, you'll need equipment. What equipment depends on whether you want to do the interview through a regular phone line or through an Internet phone line. If you want to record through a regular phone line, you'll find the topic far more complex than you might expect for a number of reasons:
- The legal issues. In many places it's illegal to record a phone call without everyone on the call agreeing to it. Depending on your country, state/province, city, etc., the rules may be different. A general rule of thumb to follow is if you're not sure is to assume it's not legal, and get the person's agreement on the recording itself. That way no one can argue later that they hadn't agreed.
- What's making the recording? Do you have a digital or tape recorder you're hooking up to the phone itself, like this one for many cordless phones or these? How are you doing the hookup? You need special hardware to record phone calls. Mac users might want to check out Parliant's PhoneValet, which (depending on the version) lets you plug your phone line into a modem or other device and handle the calls directly through your computer. You might also consider using any digital or tape recorder and putting the call on speakerphone (unless you're recording for a podcast, then you need much better audio quality, but that's for a different discussion.) Some recorders have USB connectors that you can then hook up to your computer to copy the sound file over.
Recording through an Internet phone line is a bit easier, at least where the audio's already going through your computer. All that you need, then, is a program that can capture and record both sides of that audio. For Linux, Mac, and Windows users, there's Gizmo (it's like Skype but has recording built in). For Mac Skype users, some swear by Call Recorder since Skype can't record calls without additional software.
If you're an audio buff or prefer software that can be used for more than one purpose, then you have a lot of other options, though they can be a bit more complicated to use. I have WireTap Studio for my Mac, which I used to record Skype calls. I've also used Gizmo on both Linux and the Mac.
Before you record a critical interview, be sure to test everything out first. Have someone call you, do the recording, and listen to it. Can you hear both of you clearly? You might find (as I have more than once) that you accidentally got only half of the conversation. It's much better to find this out in a practice run!
Then, once you have the interview, you may or may not need to transcribe the whole thing. At minimum, if you want to quote people correctly, you need to transcribe that part of the interview. If you read my freelancer interviews, you've seen that one of the items many freelancers which they could farm off to someone else is transcription, so that might give you the (correct) impression that transcription is a pain.
If you're not sure what transcription actually is, it involves taking an audio or video interview and typing or handwriting the entire thing out into text. You want to be positive that you transcribed every word correctly, so you have to keep pausing and rewinding over and over. It's tedious and not for the short on patience.
There are a number of ways to make this process easier. For one thing, you can pay someone else to do it! The first few times you use a particular person for this, make sure to listen to what you're going to quote while looking at the transcript so you can be sure it's correct.
Another option is speech-to-text software. The problem here is that such software typically needs to be trained by speaking to it, and may have problems understanding the many different people it would have to listen to.
Some swear by a product for the Mac, Windows, and Linux called Express Scribe. This free software is designed specifically for people who are going through the tedious process of transcription. The foot pedals you can purchase to go with the free software apparently make transcription a much smoother and faster process, enough so that I'm seriously considering purchasing a pair myself. No, I have no relationship to the company and get no referral fees.
Even if you don't need to ultimately transcribe the audio, having a recording can be intensely helpful if you remember a partial detail later but didn't take thorough notes about it. Take it from me. Just make sure to do so ethically and legally.
Comments (1) . Tagged: call recording transcript transcription record phone interview . Category: Technology Freelancing
I'd add that there are a few solutions out there that require minimal setup and the quality is amazing- www.recordiapro.com or www.callrecordercard.com are 2 of them