three formats most tools ignore
most transcription products optimize for the median user, who wants a paragraph-broken transcript with speaker labels. three audiences with much harder format requirements get almost nothing from that default:
- conversation analysts and sociolinguists need Jefferson notation — a transcription system that captures pause length, overlap, in-breath, and prosody as inline marks. no consumer transcription tool produces it.
- paralegals and litigators need 25-line paginated deposition format for filing and exhibits. transcription tools hand back a wall of text; somebody bills hours reformatting it.
- qualitative researchers need NVivo-shaped CSV (or ATLAS.ti, or MAXQDA) for coding. importing a regular transcript means rebuilding the timestamps and speaker columns by hand.
why now
for each of these three formats, the search-engine top results today are documentation explaining the format — not tools that produce it. that's a clue. the buyer isn't looking for an explainer; they have the explainer. they're looking for something to do the job. when nothing does the job, the documentation is what ranks.
we're shipping the tools.