E. YouTube
Summary: YouTube is a free option that works with videos only to create VTT files (captions with text and timestamps). Generally, VTT files are not transcripts, but can help you speed up the process of creating transcripts, in some cases. If the video is not private or sensitive (and so you are comfortable uploading it to YouTube and it complies with your research ethics approval, if applicable), you could use YouTube’s free auto transcription service to create a VTT file.
You don’t need to share the video publicly because you can upload it as a private file to your account. After uploading the video, you can use the caption service to generate a VTT file, which you can then correct and download.
But note that there won’t be any speakers’ names in the file; you would have to add those manually if you wanted them. Because you’ll have to add speaker names and timestamp divisions might not occur at a change in speaker, this could be a labour-intensive process to augment and clean up, depending on your file (for example, there would be a lot more cleanup required for a focus group transcript).
Also, as mentioned, this only works for video files – see the Notes on Converting Audio Only Files to Videos section, if needed.
Instructions:
- Follow the upload your video instructions (or the instructions if your video is longer than 15 minutes)
- Then follow the instructions to use the caption service and generate a VTT file
- Then review and correct the VTT file captions
- Finally follow the instructions to download the corrected VTT file
Technique: Qualitative Data Analysis | Tools: NVivo