MediaGizmos – Interviewy

Posted on January 21, 2014 Updated on January 20, 2014

One of the tough parts of being a journalist is transcribing interviews. Recording dialogue is the most accurate way of capturing everything your subject says. Recordings are also handy as a back up for any disputes about quotes or “who said what” if you’re doing a controversial story.

But, oy, the task of transcribing interviews! Anyone who has made their bread and butter doing this knows how time consuming and laborious this is. And yes, speech recognition software has been around for years, but for the most part one has to train the software to recognise the accent. Hardly useful if your interviewing loads of different people each week, and you live in a country like South Africa where there are 11 different languages that affect local English dialects in really interesting ways.

That’s why it was particularly pleasing to find Interviewy, an iPad or iPhone app that promises to: “record the important stuff, keep it safe and quickly transcribe it later.” What’s cool about Interviewy is that it is free; is a compact piece of software at 4.5 MB; and looks pretty easy to use. Best of all Interviewy was built by journalists, for use journalists to take away the pain of what otherwise is a great job.

We’ll be testing the app over the next couple of weeks, and hope to report back about how useful it is.

Find Interviewy at iTunes.

Interviewy’s online home.

Read more: App for journalists: Interviewy, smart recording for faster transcription at Journalism.co.uk.