Top 8 Interview Transcription Software Solutions for Recruiters [2024]

A large part of this admin work is related to interviews and intake calls. An hour of ‘interview work’ is never just an interview. In practice, it involves you speaking with a candidate for just 30 minutes, then a further 20 minutes doing all the follow-up work: transcribing, adding data to your ATS, writing a follow-up email to the hiring manager, and preparing for the next interview if the candidate is shortlisted.

But the good news is, with the right tech stack, you can delegate all of these time-consuming interview admin tasks to AI.

So let's look at AI tools that can take over the interview transcription part of the recruitment workflow so you can focus on engaging with your interviewees.  

1. Carv

Best for: Businesses that want interview transcription as part of a more holistic package that takes over all admin related to interviews and intake calls.

Carv is AI recruitment software that takes over administrative tasks related to interviews and intake calls. Carv’s platform can totally transform a recruiter’s day-to-day workload by bringing admin down to zero so they can focus entirely on human-centric activities.

The tool’s main strength is that its features are all designed with the recruitment process in mind. This means it’s able to support you with all interview-related admin. For example:

• Pre-interview: Carv’s interview recording feature captures every detail during intake calls with hiring managers so you don’t need to worry about manual transcription, or even about taking notes. It then uses the AI transcript to craft job descriptions in seconds, based on the requirements of the hiring manager.
• During the interview: Carv assists you throughout the interview, taking a full verbatim transcription of your conversation with candidates. It will then let you know at the end of the interview if there are any
unanswered questions to cover and use the transcript to auto-generate a full candidate
profile.



• Post-interview: Once the interview is over, Carv generates a summary of the interview and a candidate presentation or motivation to the hiring manager stating why the candidates would or wouldn’t be a right fit for the role. It will also pre-populate your ATS with the candidate data and send a follow-up with the candidate too.

What customers love about Carv: The time savings achieved by delegating the admin work, as well as the ready-to-use output generated by AI. TA teams appreciate that Carv keeps recruiters and hiring managers on the same page, and no information gets lost in the hiring process.

2. Otter.ai

Best for: Recruiters who need to record and transcribe interviews on the go.

Otter.ai is an AI-powered meeting note-taking and chat app. It’s not a tool that’s designed specifically for recruiters, but it’s a versatile tool that can easily be used for interview transcriptions of any kind and we included it in our guide to the top AI meeting tools too.

The tool’s main strengths are that it can handle speech-to-text conversion in real-time, provide auto-generated summaries and post-meeting action items. It also has a powerful search function that allows you to scan through hours of audio to zoom in on a specific topic.

As Otter is an automatic transcription tool for any situation (not just recruitment) this means it has a wide variety of integrations to suit different types of workflows. I recently used it to transcribe a podcast interview, for example. I just uploaded the audio recording straight through the Dropbox integration and the tool generated a txt file of the interview in seconds. You could do this easily with candidate interviews too.

A real stand-out feature of Otter.ai is that it has an iOS and Android mobile app, meaning recruiters can even record and transcribe interviews on the go.

What customers love about Otter.ai: Its voice-to-text precision and user-friendly interface.

3. Metaview

Best for: Mid-to-large enterprises that want to coach their recruiters to become better interviewers.

Metaview is an AI tool that creates automatic, AI-generated interview notes for you so you can save time and focus on having high-quality interactions with candidates.

A key feature of Metaview is its interview assistant, which is essentially a ChatGPT integration for interviews: You ask the bot questions about your interview transcriptions and it will return answers and insights.

Aside from this, Metaview also comes with AI-generated interview notes, notes for intakes, candidate debriefs and automated candidate summaries.

As well as being good at automated transcriptions, Metaview is a great learning tool for helping recruiters become better interviewers. The AI can quickly train and calibrate new recruiters by helping them ask the right questions, phrase their questions in a more effective way and even reduce interview biases.

Metaview integrates with a lot of the major recruitment ATS software, meaning it streamlines a lot of the manual work by passing interview data back and forth instead of relying on manual input.

One thing to mention is that if you’re looking for a tool that can also AI-generate interview questions and candidate scorecards, this isn’t something Metview offers.

What customers love about Metaview: The tool’s interview coaching and external feedback feature.

4. Interviewer AI

Best for: Larger businesses or staffing agencies that do a lot of volume hiring.

Interviewer.AI is an AI-powered video interviewing platform that helps recruiters pre-screen, interview, and shortlist candidates within minutes. It’s one of the most popular interview automation tools on the market right now.

Unlike most of the tools in this list, Interviewer AI is specifically for pre-screening and shortlisting candidates. This means that, rather than assisting recruiters to have better, more human interviews with candidates, Interviewer AI handles the whole interview asynchronously over video. This is what makes this tool a great option for larger enterprises that do a lot of volume hiring.

By using an interview automation tool like Interviewer AI, you can reduce the turnaround time for shortlisting candidates substantially by letting the technology handle the entire pre-screening interview and transcription process without any human input.

The UX of this tool isn’t as nice as some of the other software in this list, and it can be a bit unintuitive at times. However, it’s likely this is something they’ll improve in the near future.

What customers love about Interviewer AI: Saves time by weeding out unqualified candidates prior to live interviews.

5. Sonix

Best for: Large global companies that recruit internationally.

If you’re a global company operating in a number of different countries with staff spanning a diverse scope of languages, an interview transcription tool that only supports English isn’t going to cut it.

Sure, you’ll have recruiters who can hold the interviews in the interviewee’s language. But what if the hiring manager or other members of senior management don’t speak the same language? This is where an AI-powered transcription tool like Sonix can be a real game-changer.

Record the interview using a tool like Zoom or Microsoft Teams and upload the video recording or audio file to Sonix in almost any file format (mpg, avi, wav, mov, mp3). The tool will then transcribe the voice recordings into text and convert it into any of the 40 languages it currently supports with just a click of a button.

Sonix is a great option if you tend to have more than two people in an interview, as it comes with multi-track recording and powerful speech recognition. You can also choose to switch verbatim transcription off, which removes all the ‘em’s ‘um’s and ‘ah’s that no one wants to read.

What customers love about Sonix: Its ability to provide accurate transcription in many different languages.

6. Aspect

Best for: For any recruiter looking to improve candidate experience during interviews.

Aspect is an AI co-pilot for hiring that generates human-level AI notes for interviews. Interview transcription isn’t the number one focus of this software, it’s part of a larger interview intelligence package that includes AI Q&As, candidate summaries, interview best practice generation and a powerful interview search function.

Aspect’s robust integrations are a key strength, as the tool integrates tightly with video interview platforms like Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams as well as some leading ATS software like Recruitee, TeamTailor and Lever.

A stand-out feature of Aspect is its ability to automatically generate candidate scorecards and fill them out based on information from the interview transcription.

Pricing tiers are also quite versatile, as they come in five different packages ranging from Single Recruiter through to Enterprise. This is helpful in that you’re not likely to find you’re paying for features you’re not going to use, depending on your circumstances.

What customers love about Aspect: The tight ATS integrations and the fact it integrates with Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams.

7. BarRaiser

Best for: Mid-market and enterprise businesses that want to ensure they have a standardised, unbiased interview process.

BarRaiser is an intelligent interview platform that aims to help recruiters use interview intelligence to make better hiring decisions. Or in other words, to ‘raise the bar’ with how they recruit (hence the name).

The emphasis with BarRaiser is using AI interview features to create structured, standardised interviews that are consistent in a way that removes any potential biases.

The software comes with a whole suite of products, including an integrated video interview platform with timestamp recordings, real-time interview transcriptions, an interview co-pilot and structured interview planning tool. It also uses AI to generate structured interviews, provide real-time feedback, and interview highlights.

BarRaiser does integrate with the main video conferencing apps as well as having its own video platform, but the integration can be a little clunky.

What customers love about BarRaiser: Detailed AI-generated post-interview feedback (for both the candidate and interviewer).

8. Trint

Best for:  Small-to-medium businesses or independent recruiters looking for hassle-free transcriptions for interviews

Like Otter.ai, Trint is another web-based AI-powered interview transcription software that’s not specifically designed for recruiters but can still be used as part of a recruiter’s tech stack.

Compared to a lot of the recruitment-focused tools in this guide, Trint provides a no-frills transcription service that has pricing to match. This makes it a great option if you’re a smaller business recruiting on a budget or an independent recruiter who’s interviewing candidates alone.

Once you’ve uploaded an audio or video file, you can easily check through the interview content, edit, playback or search through the interview to jump to specific keywords.

Like Sonix, Trint also offers interview transcriptions in other languages as well as English, but users do complain that some translations can be poor depending on the language.

What customers love about Trint: Its user friendly interface and the fact the tool is generally very straight-forward to use.

Choose your AI interview transcription tool

If there’s one thing we can say for sure, it’s that the days of manual transcription are dead now thanks to the emergence of these excellent AI-powered interview transcription tools.

As a recruiter, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by choice having so many great options at your fingertips. But if you’re going to invest in this kind of software, it’s worth choosing an AI technology that’s designed specifically with recruitment challenges in mind. That way, you’re paying for a tool that you can trust to take over all interview admin, including pre- and post-interview tasks as well as what happens during the interview.

Carv takes over all the interview-related admin and more, bringing it down to zero. Try it out today.