Phonotheca and Otter.ai
An Otter.ai alternative that takes the whole study
Most people leave Otter mid-project, when the import limit lands or a two-hour interview comes back short. Phonotheca meters hours of audio, takes recordings at any length, and keeps every interview in one searchable archive you can tag, quote, and export.
Interview 11
How did the team decide which one to keep?
Whoever had the recording won the argument.
Shared recordNobody could find the other one afterwards.
Open the sample workspaceNo account needed.
Which tool fits which job
Phonotheca fits when you have
- Interviews you record and upload, rather than calls transcribed live
- A corpus that grows over months and gets searched as a whole
- Tagged passages and quotes exported with speaker, source, and timestamp
- Recordings that have to stay in the EU and out of model training
Otter fits when you have
- Live meetings transcribed while they happen
- Summaries and action items right after a call
- An assistant that joins calendar meetings for you
- Sharing notes with a team inside a meeting workflow
Both products change. Check each vendor’s site before you switch.
Three things that work differently here
Metered by audio hour
Free covers 3 audio hours, Solo 20 a month, Pro 50. Upload as many recordings as the study produces, at whatever length they ran, in files up to 2 GB each. Nothing here counts files.
Processed and stored in the EU
Audio and transcripts stay in European regions, the transcription service deletes its copy once the transcript lands, and nothing is used to train models.
Built to be quoted from
Copy a passage with its speaker, interview, and timestamp attached, or export the project as Markdown, CSV, or a REFI-QDA archive for NVivo, ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA, and Dedoose.
What changes once the interviews pile up
A single transcript is a commodity. The thirtieth one is where the work starts, when the passage you half-remember could be in any of them and the only thing that helps is search across the whole corpus.
That is the part Phonotheca is built for. Interviews live in projects, a speaker renamed once in a recording carries through every quote and export from it, tags collect the same theme from every recording, and any passage copies out with its citation already attached.
Every Otter limit, by planWhoever had the recording won the argument.
Speaker 2 · 00:22:15 · Interview 11
Copy with citationPricing without a file count
Hours of audio are the limit on every plan.
Free
Enough to see a corpus take shape.
$0forever
3 audio hours, once
- Unlimited projects, interviews, and tags
- Full-text search across every transcript
- Markdown, CSV, and REFI-QDA export
Solo
A study's worth of interviews, every month.
$12per month
20 audio hours a month
- Hours reset on your renewal date
- Everything in Free, never gated
Pro
RecommendedFor a fieldwork season or a whole cohort.
$29per month
50 audio hours a month
- Hours reset on your renewal date
- Everything in Solo
Prices are in USD, tax added at checkout. Compare the plans
Questions before switching
- Does Phonotheca join my calls?
- No. There is no meeting bot and no live transcription. You upload a recording after the fact and the transcript comes back, usually within minutes.
- My department asks which tools are approved for research data.
- Some universities publish guidance naming specific tools. The University of Maryland's AI toolkit lists Otter.ai as not approved for organizational use, and Ohio State directs staff to institutionally provided tools instead. Those pages turn on where data is processed, who else receives it, retention, and whether a DPA exists, so the data governance statement answers each of them in the order the forms ask, with the sub-processor list and countries written out.
- Can I bring the transcripts I already have in Otter?
- Yes. Export them as TXT, SRT, or VTT and import the files into a project. Speakers and timings come across as turns you can tag and cite, and an import spends none of your transcription hours, so an archive built somewhere else moves over for nothing.
- How long can one interview be?
- As long as it ran, in a file up to 2 GB. A two-hour life history uploads as one recording and stays one transcript, and it spends two of your hours. Otter caps each imported conversation at 90 minutes.
- What does an audio hour cost?
- Solo is $12 a month for 20 audio hours and Pro is $29 for 50, so $0.60 and $0.58 an audio hour. Running out pauses new transcription, and the archive, search, and export keep working.
- How well does it separate two people talking?
- Interviewer and respondent separate cleanly on most recordings, including rapid question and answer. Where a short interjection is absorbed into the wrong turn, split the segment at that word and reassign the speaker.
- Can it transcribe interviews that are not in English?
- Yes, in dozens of languages, and you set the language on each recording rather than leaving it to detection, which is where accented and mixed-language audio usually goes wrong. Otter's published list runs to six languages.
- Is there a free plan?
- Three audio hours, granted once, with the full workspace behind them. Projects, tags, search, and export stay available afterwards whether or not you ever pay.
Keep reading
Try it on one interview you already have
Three audio hours are free and the archive stays open afterwards.