Professions · Researchers
Meeting notes for researchers.
Qualitative research runs on transcripts, and transcription is where the fieldwork budget and the researcher's week both disappear.
A single hour of semi-structured interview takes most researchers four to six hours to transcribe by hand, and a study with thirty participants turns that into a term of work before any coding starts. GetNotes takes the field recording and returns a speaker-labelled transcript ready to import into your analysis, so the time goes into the codebook and the analytic memo rather than into typing.
Focus groups are the case where diarisation stops being a convenience and becomes the requirement. Eight participants, overlapping talk, and analysis that depends on knowing whether an idea was echoed by three people or asserted repeatedly by one loud one. Automatic speaker separation gives you an attributable transcript instead of a wall of undifferentiated text. The tags come back as Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and so on, so you map them to your participant identifiers as you read, which is a far smaller job than attributing every turn from scratch.
Fieldwork is also where bot-based tools are structurally useless. Interviews happen in kitchens, clinics, markets and community halls, off any calendar and often in the participant's first language, so there is simply no call for a notetaker to join. GetNotes records the room on a phone and transcribes 90+ languages including mid-sentence code-switching, which is the normal register of multilingual research settings rather than an edge case to be apologised for in the methods section.
Where it earns its keep
Thirty interviews and one term to analyse them
The fieldwork went well, which is the problem: you now have thirty hours of audio and a deadline. Uploading each recording and getting a speaker-labelled transcript back means coding can start this week rather than after a month of typing you did not budget for.
A focus group where one participant dominates
Analysing group data means knowing who said what and how often, not just what was said. Automatic speaker labels let you see that the apparently shared view came from one person repeated four times, which is exactly the distinction that changes a finding.
An interview conducted in someone's kitchen
The participant is most comfortable at home, in their own language, with a kettle going. There is no calendar invite and no call for a notetaker bot to join. A phone on the table records the room, and GetNotes transcribes the language they actually spoke.
How GetNotes works
- Record or upload. Hit record on your phone or laptop in the room — or drop in an audio file you already have. No bot joins anything.
- It writes it down. Every word transcribed, every speaker labelled, in 90+ languages including ones that switch mid-sentence.
- Share the minutes.Summary, decisions, and action items with owners — ready before everyone's back at their desk.
Questions, answered
Can I get transcripts in a format I can code in NVivo or MAXQDA?
GetNotes produces a full speaker-labelled transcript alongside the structured notes, plus a copy button that puts the text on your clipboard, so it goes into NVivo, MAXQDA or a plain text file the way any transcript would. Most researchers verify against the audio before coding anyway — automatic transcription removes the typing, not the need to know your data.
How reliable are the speaker labels in a focus group?
Diarisation is automatic and works well when participants have distinct voices and take turns; heavy overlapping talk is difficult for any system. Labels arrive as Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and so on, so you map them to your participant identifiers and correct the passages where two people spoke at once. That remains far quicker than transcribing from scratch.
Does it work for interviews conducted in a language other than English?
Yes. GetNotes transcribes 90+ languages and handles participants who move between languages mid-sentence, which is standard in multilingual fieldwork rather than unusual. That means a Tamil-and-English interview or a Hindi-and-English one comes back as a single coherent transcript instead of requiring separate handling.
What about ethics approval and participant consent?
Those conditions come from your ethics committee, not from GetNotes. Record consent on the audio at the start, follow your approved storage and retention plan, and check whether your protocol allows identifiable audio to be processed by a cloud service. GetNotes keeps recordings private to your account and lets you delete them permanently, audio included.
Other professions
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