Interview transcription for journalists, on your own Mac

Transcribing interviews is some of the slowest work in journalism. An hour of tape can take several hours to type up, and the one quote you need is always somewhere in the middle. Automatic transcription helps, but most services work by uploading the audio to their servers.

For a lot of interviews that is fine. For a source who has asked not to be named, it means handing the one recording that could identify them to a third party. This page covers what to weigh, and how Hearkeeper, a Mac app that is not released yet, is built to transcribe on your own computer.

Source protection starts with where the audio goes

A recording of a source is more revealing than a transcript. It carries their voice, the way they speak, background sounds and sometimes their name. Once it is uploaded to a transcription service, it exists on servers you do not control, under that company’s retention policy and subject to the legal demands that company receives.

Many journalists already work around this by typing up sensitive interviews themselves. A tool that transcribes locally removes the trade-off: you get the transcript without the upload.

Legal protection for sources varies by country. Iceland’s Media Act, for example, forbids staff of registered media from revealing a source who has asked for anonymity (Lög um fjölmiðla nr. 38/2011, art. 25). Other countries protect sources more or less strongly, or not at all. Whatever the law where you work, fewer copies of the recording means fewer places it can leak from.

Follow your own newsroom’s rules and your professional code on sources, anonymity and recording. The points here are general, not legal advice.

How Hearkeeper transcribes interviews

Recording on the Mac, in person or remote. Hearkeeper records your microphone and your computer’s audio directly on the Mac. For an interview in a café or an office, it records the room. For one on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack huddles, Webex or FaceTime, it records both sides of the call without a bot joining. The guide on recording system audio on a Mac explains how that part works.

Transcription on the device. Speech is transcribed on your Mac with whisper.cpp, accelerated by Metal. Live captions appear about 2–4 seconds behind the speaker. After you stop, a final pass with Whisper large-v3 turbo replaces them and separates the speakers, so your questions and the answers are told apart. On an Apple silicon Mac we measured that final pass at about ten times faster than real time.

Nothing uploaded. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you connect a team server or your own API key. If you connect neither, the audio and the transcript stay on your disk. It works offline too, which helps on the road or on a network you do not trust.

Find the quote by the exact second

A transcript is only useful if you can trust it. Automatic transcription makes mistakes, especially with names, accents and crosstalk, and a misquote is worse than no quote.

Hearkeeper links every line of the transcript to the second it was said. Click a line and the recording plays from there, so you can check the exact words before you publish. The same goes for summaries and answers: when you ask a question across your interviews, each part of the answer points to its moment in the recording.

Search runs across all your interviews, stored in one SQLite file on your disk. Looking for the time a source mentioned a particular company or date is a search, not an afternoon of scrubbing.

Icelandic and multilingual interviews

Transcription covers 99 languages. Icelandic is first-class: Hearkeeper is made in Reykjavík, and the speech pipeline is tuned for Icelandic. Interviews that switch between Icelandic and English are detected automatically, with each part kept in its own language.

That also helps foreign correspondents and anyone interviewing people in a language other than the one they write in. See Icelandic transcription for more.

Recording-consent laws vary

Whether you may record an interview without the other person agreeing depends on where you and they are. Some places allow recording when one party to the conversation consents; others require everyone to agree. In the United States the rules differ from state to state, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press keeps a state-by-state recording guide for journalists. In Iceland, the Electronic Communications Act (art. 91) requires you to tell the other party at the start of a phone call that you intend to record it.

Hearkeeper is not built for recording without people knowing. Every recording starts with a consent step, where you read a notice aloud or post it in the chat, and a consent receipt is saved with the recording. A recording pill stays on screen, shows in screen shares and cannot be hidden. For an interview, that step fits naturally into the moment you ask “Is it all right if I record this?”. The guide on recording meetings with consent covers the common rules.

Your files, your archive

• Audio and transcripts are your own files on your own disk, to back up, encrypt or delete as your newsroom’s practice requires.
• Notes export to Markdown, plain text that any editor or CMS can take.
• Deleting is final. If you never connected a server, deleting an interview on your Mac leaves no cloud copy behind.

A local tool also puts the job of protecting those files on you. Use disk encryption and a strong password, and think about where your backups go.

What to check in any transcription tool

Before trusting any service with a sensitive interview, including ours, ask:

• Is the audio uploaded, and where is it processed?
• Does it work with the network turned off?
• How long does the vendor keep recordings and transcripts, and are they used for training?
• Can I jump from a line of the transcript to the moment in the audio?
• Can I export and delete everything?

When is it available?

Hearkeeper is coming to the Mac first (macOS 14.2 or later, Apple silicon and Intel), with other platforms later.

If you want interview transcripts that never leave your own computer, join the waitlist and we will email you when there is a build for you.