For Research Analysts ·
What you'll accomplish
By the end of this guide, you'll have Otter.ai set up to transcribe your focus group recordings and in-depth interviews automatically. A 90-minute session that previously took 3–4 hours to transcribe manually will be ready in under 10 minutes — with speaker labels already separated — leaving you to spend your time on analysis, not typing.
What you'll need
Go to otter.ai. Click Sign Up Free and create an account with your email or Google account. Confirm your email if prompted.
What you should see: The Otter.ai home screen showing your conversation library (empty at first).
Click the Import button (or the + icon) and select Import Audio/Video. Choose your focus group or interview recording from your computer.
Supported formats: MP3, MP4, WAV, M4A, M4V, MP4A, OGG, OGX, OPUS, WEBM.
What you should see: A progress bar as the file uploads. Otter automatically begins transcription as soon as the upload completes. Troubleshooting: Large files (>1GB) may take several minutes to upload. If the upload fails, try compressing the video to a smaller MP4 first.
For a 60-minute recording, transcription typically takes 5–10 minutes. You'll receive an email notification when it's done, or you can watch the progress in the Otter web app.
What you should see: The transcript appears in your Otter library. When complete, it shows full transcript text with speaker labels (Speaker A, Speaker B, etc.) and timestamps.
Otter automatically detects different speakers but labels them generically (Speaker 1, Speaker 2). Click on any speaker label to rename them: e.g., "Moderator", "Participant 1", "Participant 2".
What you should see: All instances of that speaker update automatically across the full transcript.
Listen to 2-3 minutes of audio alongside the transcript to check accuracy. Focus group audio with multiple speakers can have errors when participants talk over each other. Common issues:
Click directly in the transcript to edit any errors inline.
Click Export → choose your format:
What you should see: A download dialog — your transcript file saves to your computer.