Oak for Researchers & Academics Transcription is the biggest time-sink in qualitative work — Oak hands those hours back with verbatim, speaker-ID transcripts and citable, timestamped quotes.
The researcher situation
Interviews, focus groups, fieldwork, supervisions, lab meetings and conferences — much of it multilingual and all of it data. Qualitative analysis lives or dies on accurate verbatim transcription with reliable speaker attribution, and producing that by hand is the single largest time cost in a study.
Generic tools lose code-switched Cantonese and domain terminology, blur who said what, and — just as importantly — send sensitive data somewhere you can't account for, which is a problem the moment consent and ethics approval are on the line.
How Oak fits your work
- → Verbatim multilingual transcription with speaker ID at 94% accuracy — interviews and focus groups attributed correctly across participants.
- → Citable, timestamped quotes — every line links to its exact moment in the audio, so you can verify and reference with confidence.
- → Ask AI to surface themes across a corpus: "Which participants mentioned cost as a barrier?" — a fast first pass before formal coding.
- → A Jargon Library for domain terms, and data that stays in your workspace — with access controls that suit consent and ethics obligations.
What you get back
- Hours of manual transcription per study, returned
- Citable quotes traceable to the second
- A fast first pass at themes before coding
- Sensitive data kept private in your workspace
Oak vs. generic transcription — for qualitative research
| What you need | Oak | Generic transcription |
|---|---|---|
| Speaker ID across focus-group participants | ✓ Yes | — Inconsistent |
| Timestamped quotes for citation | ✓ To the second | — Section-level |
| Cantonese ↔ English ↔ Mandarin + domain jargon | ✓ Industry-leading | — Drops accuracy |
| Data stays in your workspace | ✓ Yes | — Often unclear |
Oak for researchers: common questions
Can Oak attribute quotes to individual focus-group participants?
Yes — speaker identification labels each participant consistently across the recording, and every line is timestamped, so you can attribute and verify quotes precisely. See Timestamped Transcripts and Speaker Identification.
Are the transcripts accurate enough for verbatim qualitative analysis?
Oak transcribes at 94% accuracy with automatic language detection and is industry-leading on Cantonese code-switching. A Jargon Library lets you pre-load domain terminology so specialised vocabulary is captured rather than guessed.
Where does my interview data go?
Data stays within your workspace, governed by access controls and retention settings — which matters when your study is bound by consent and ethics approval.
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