Hello AoIR members, I'm hoping to hear that ethnographic transcription tools have advanced miraculously since I last was transcribing tapes. Does anyone know whether it is now possible to have voice recognition (or other) software transcribe interview tapes directly? For example, if I have a digital or analog recording, is there anything out there that can provide even a rough transcription of it automatically? perhaps like closed captioning? In the past, I've used Dragon Naturally Speaking to help me transcribe analog audio cassette tapes. To do this, I listened to the tape using a regular foot- pedal transcription machine and then repeated everything that I heard into the microphone attached to the computer. That way, it didn't matter that I had multiple voices on the tape and that I didn't have each speaker train the software to recognize his/her voice (not a possibility). Dragon was trained to recognize my voice, and my re-voicing of everything could produce acceptable first passes of the transcript. Then, I could go back to edit. Saved some time, but more important, it saved some of the repetitive motions of typing. Does anyone know of a better technique now? And/or are there tools other than voice recognition available? Thanks, Karen -- Karen Lunsford, Assistant Professor of Writing Writing Program University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3010 klunsford@writing.ucsb.edu 805-893-8556