If you've never ordered professional transcription before, the process can feel more opaque than it needs to be. What file formats are accepted? How is pricing actually calculated? What do you need to decide before you upload anything? Here's the whole process broken down, so nothing catches you off guard partway through.

Focus groups generate some of the richest, messiest audio in qualitative research. Six to twelve people talking, sometimes over each other, sometimes in a room with bad acoustics, sometimes over a Zoom call with someone's dog barking in the background. Getting that audio into a clean, usable transcript is where a lot of research budgets and timelines quietly get tested. Not every transcription service handles this well, and the right one often depends on the kind of focus group you're actually running.

I stumbled on a YouTube conversation that stopped me in my tracks. Stine Grodal, a distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Northeastern University, and Henri Schildt, Professor at Aalto University School of Business, sat down for a refreshingly honest discussion about AI and what it really means for qualitative research. No buzzwords, no panic, just two scholars thinking out loud about a question researchers everywhere are grappling with: what does this actually mean for my work?