For Institutions

AuTrans for Universities and Education

Turn lectures, seminars, research interviews and fieldwork recordings into searchable text — including sessions conducted in Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Pidgin.

Usually a department head, a research director or a librarian running a digitisation budget. The people who feel the pain are postgraduate researchers and lecturers; the people who sign are one level up.

What this looks like today

  • Postgraduate researchers spend weeks transcribing fieldwork interviews by hand instead of analysing them
  • Interviews conducted in Nigerian languages get transcribed by whoever on the team happens to speak them, inconsistently and slowly
  • Lecture recordings pile up unindexed, so nobody can find anything in them a semester later
  • Paid transcription services quote per audio minute and blow through a research grant fast
  • International tools mangle Nigerian names, places and code-switching, so every transcript needs heavy correction anyway

What changes

  • Interviews and lectures come back as searchable text with speakers separated, so quotes can be found instead of hunted for
  • Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Pidgin are handled directly, not routed through an English-only model that guesses
  • Code-switching mid-sentence — the way people actually speak in an interview — stays intact rather than being dropped
  • Whole departments work from one account with a shared hour pool, instead of every researcher expensing their own subscription
  • Transcripts export to DOCX, PDF or plain text, so they drop straight into a thesis, a coding tool like NVivo, or an institutional archive
  • Per-file pricing from $0.20 exists for departments that would rather not commit to a plan at all

Procurement, data and contracts

  • Invoiced annually against a purchase order — no card required, and no per-seat licence to reconcile
  • Your recordings are never used to train AI models. This is a standing commitment, not a setting someone can flip
  • Recordings and transcripts stay yours; you can delete them, and deletion removes the derived data too
  • Sharing is view-only by link, so supervisors and co-authors can read a transcript without an account
  • We will sign your data-handling agreement. Send it to us rather than asking whether we have one
  • Hour allowances are set on your account directly, so a research push in one month doesn't need a plan change

Frequently asked questions

Can you handle interviews recorded in Nigerian languages?

Yes — that is the reason AuTrans exists. Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Nigerian Pidgin are first-class, alongside Nigerian-accented English. Interviews that switch between a local language and English mid-sentence, which is how most fieldwork interviews actually sound, are handled as one recording rather than needing to be split up.

Will our research recordings be used to train your models?

No. Audio is never used for training, under any plan, including institutional ones. If your ethics board needs that in writing, we will put it in the agreement.

How does billing work for a department?

One account holds a pool of hours that everyone in the department draws from, and we invoice annually against a purchase order. There is no per-seat licence and no card on file. Tell us roughly how many hours of audio a year you expect and we will quote against it.

Can we get a transcript that is accurate enough to quote in a publication?

Every transcript is fully editable, with the audio playing alongside the text, so a researcher can verify and correct a quote before it goes into a paper. We would expect any serious publication to verify quotes against the audio regardless of who produced the transcript — the value here is that the verification takes minutes rather than the transcription taking weeks.

Do you offer a trial before we commit budget?

Yes. Start on the free plan to see how it handles your own recordings — your audio, your languages, your recording conditions — before anyone raises a purchase order. If you want a larger trial across a department, ask and we will arrange it.

Related

Tell us your volume and we'll quote

Roughly how many hours of audio a year, and in which languages. We price against that rather than a published tier. You can also start on the free plan first and run your own recordings through it before anyone raises a purchase order.

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AuTrans for Universities and Education | AuTrans