App for journalists: Interviewy, for faster transcription

Devices: iPhone / iPad

Cost: Free

What is is? A smart dictaphone app for easier interview transcribing

How it is of use to journalists? Transcribing interviews can be time-consuming, but this new app aims to change all that with smart recording for faster transcription.

There are already a few good dictaphone apps around such as VC Audio Pro and iSaidWhat?

However, the key selling point for Interviewy is the ability to add TypeTags – a visual marker in the audio file – to flag up whenever your interviewee says something especially interesting.


Credit: Screenshot from Interviewy.co.uk

The app is simple to use: swipe up to start recording, down to stop or pause, and hit the speech bubble icon to drop in a TypeTag. 

For a longer quote, just hold your finger on the speech bubble to create a longer TypeTag.

Then when the time comes for transcribing, you can jump between TypeTags to skip to the most interesting points of the interview.

Another useful aspect of Interviewy is that it auto-syncs with iCloud, so all your recordings are accessible from anywhere and safely backed-up in case you lose or damage your phone.

However, there is one key feature of Interviewy which was not quite ready when the app launched last week.

Hit the 'transcribe' option in the audio files view and you'll get a message which reads: "Need someone to transcribe this for you? We're working on exactly that, but it's not quite ready yet. Fire us an email and we'll let you know when our typists are at their desks..."

Also on the down-side, users are currently not able to export audio out of the app, which might make some journalists wary of using it – despite the iCloud back-up.

It is also not possible to transcribe within the same screen as the audio player, meaning another device or notepad is needed to write up the interview.

So while the TypeTag functionality is undoubtedly a really useful feature of this app for journalists, there's definitely room for improvement in further stages of development.

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