Conducting interviews can be a challenge, especially for students who are just getting started in their careers. Otter is a major asset for these...
Sydney Kuntz
September 9, 2019
Students in the field of journalism, language, and communications often struggle to juggle many writing obligations at once. Between coursework, writing for campus publications, and work for jobs or internships, they can end up with many projects at once. That’s where Otter comes in handy.
Kahini Mehta is an undergraduate student at Brown University in Rhode Island. She found Otter in the same way that many students find new things-- through Google searching for it.
“I needed an app that would make it easier to transcribe notes, since I conduct a lot of interviews,” she said. “I was searching for such apps on Google, and Otter was one of the most convenient ones.”
In the semester since she’s discovered Otter, Kahini has found that Otter has greatly reduced the time it takes for her to sift through notes from the interviews she does for her journalism classes.
“Before Otter, transcribing was extremely stressful because I’d have to listen to hours of audio, which would take days to transcribe,” she said.
Now, interviewing is less of a burden and more of a manageable part of the reporting and writing process. Additionally, Kahini has found that she can use the app for other parts of her college life as well.
“Usually [I use Otter] to record interviews while writing stories for my journalism classes, or campus publications, but sometimes during lectures to take notes also,” she said.
Users love Otter for its accessibility and accuracy, but additional features also make it incredibly adaptable for many uses.
“I like the ability to add pictures to transcripts, and the easy exportation of text and audio,” Kahini said.
Adding pictures is useful for students who might want to enrich the text from their conversations with photos of whiteboards, diagrams, photos of note pages, or any other visual that might help them later on. Pictures can be added in the moment while recording, or later on as they edit the text.
Exporting is also easy and a great option for students. While it’s easy for users to access Otter conversations from any device and share them within the app using groups, they can also download text and audio from conversations to use in other programs for their educational projects. Users looking to generate captions for podcasts or video can even download Otter conversations as .SRT files. All of this allows users to easily integrate Otter into their own work style and use it in conjunction with other programs they love.
Kahini’s best experience with Otter highlights the efficiency that it brings to users.
“It was my longest interview, since it saved the most time,” she said. “It was an hour and 15 minutes, and with Otter, it only took me three minutes to read through and extract quotes.”
Rather than spending countless hours listening to interviews on repeat to transcribe and find quotes, Kahini is now able to streamline her reporting process and let Otter generate a text that she can search through to find the most important quotes.
Students are under a great deal of pressure to complete many assignments at short notice. Otter helps them to reduce some of that stress so they can balance their time better and have more time to dedicate to the parts of their education that they are most passionate about. Sign up and take advantage of Otter’s 600 monthly minutes of free transcription today!
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