How to Use Notta to Transcribe and Translate Interviews

The short answer: eight 45-minute customer interviews in German and French fit Notta Pro with room to spare, 360 minutes to transcribe and 360 more to translate into English, 720 of the 1,800 minutes Pro gives for $8.17 a month on annual billing, per the pricing page and the usage rules, checked on 26 October 2026. The steps: add your product names to the vocabulary, record or upload each interview in its spoken language, correct the transcript, translate it, summarise with an interview template, and let an assistant draft the synthesis through Notta MCP for you to check against the quotes.

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Customer interviews in the customer's own language are worth more than interviews in yours. The cost lands afterwards, when someone has to turn six hours of German into a page the team will read. This guide is that afternoon, done in Notta. For plans and limits, see the Notta entry.

Before the first interview:

1. Do the minutes sum. Each interview costs its length twice once you translate it, per the usage rules, rounded up to the whole minute. For example, 8 x 45 = 360, and 360 x 2 = 720 minutes. The free plan stops each recording at 3 minutes, so it cannot run a real interview.
2. Use the recordings you already have. Zoom recordings, phone voice memos and files from an agency all upload; each one also uses one of Pro's 100 monthly imports, per the import article.
3. Decide what a good synthesis looks like. One test works: every quote in it can be traced to a recording and a timestamp. Count how many cannot, each round.

Step 1: Teach it your names

Product names, competitor names and job titles are where transcripts go wrong. On Notta Web, open Settings, then My Vocabulary, the English Vocabulary tab, and add each term, as the vocabulary article describes. Pro holds 50 English words; bulk upload from a spreadsheet needs Business. Spend the 50 on words a stranger would misspell.

Step 2: Capture each interview in its own language

For a live call, send the Notta bot to the Zoom, Teams, Google Meet or Webex meeting, as the interview guide suggests, and tell the interviewee it is there. For a file, click Upload & transcribe, drop the file in, set the transcription language to the language spoken in the file, and tick Configure speaker identification, per the import article.

With speaker identification on, a file can run to 3 hours; without it, 5. An interview in German transcribed as English is wasted minutes, so check the language setting every time.

Step 3: Correct the transcript before anything else

Name the speakers, then read with the recording playing. The interview guide lists the tools: playback speed, skip silence, find and replace, and bookmarks on the passages you will quote. Filter to the interviewee's speech under Conversation Insights to fade out your own questions.

This step carries the rest. The translation article says translation accuracy depends on the transcript, and the translated text itself cannot be edited.

Step 4: Translate

Open the record, click the Translate icon, choose English and click Translate. Pro and above have this, per the translation article. You can then show the original, the translation or both side by side, which is the view to quote from. If a sentence comes out wrong, correct the original and translate again, knowing that each retranslation uses the recording's length in minutes again.

Step 5: Summarise with an interview template

Generic meeting notes flatten interviews into action items. In the AI Notes area, click customize and write a template prompt: the job the customer was trying to do, what they used before, what nearly stopped them buying, and quotes in their words with timestamps. The button at the bottom right of the prompt field has Notta rewrite the prompt for the meeting type; apply it if it reads better, then click Save and Generate, per the templates article. Pro allows 5 custom templates, per the plan guide, so keep this one for every interview.

Step 6: Draft the synthesis with an assistant, then check it

Notta's MCP server lets Claude Desktop, Cursor or Codex read your transcripts and summaries. Setup needs Node.js: install the package with npm, add Notta to the assistant's configuration with an upload folder and an export folder, restart, then ask the assistant to run the auth_setup tool and sign in, per the setup article.

Then ask it to list the eight interviews, read each transcript and draft a two-page synthesis: recurring jobs, objections, and the words customers used, each quote tagged with the recording and timestamp. A person checks every quote against the side-by-side view in Notta before the synthesis goes to the team. Notta's own MCP page describes the same order for consultants: draft from the transcript, check the details against the conversation, then share.

Step 7: Export what the team will read

Click the Download icon on a record, choose the format and text type, and download, per the download article. Word, PDF, Excel and SRT are on offer, with original text, translation or both. Ten records can be downloaded in one batch; folders cannot.

What the Notta help centre warns about

• Translation spends minutes. A 16-minute recording translated once uses 32 minutes in total.
• Uploads need quota as well as minutes. A batch larger than your remaining upload count does not run.
• Vocabulary is not used everywhere. My Vocabulary is ignored for YouTube transcription.
• MCP stays inside its folders. Files the assistant uploads or downloads must sit in the folders set during setup.

Plan for the length of the project

The pricing page opens on annual billing at $8.17 a month, and minutes never carry over, so a quiet month is paid for anyway. That default suits Notta's renewal rate more than a research project with an end date. If the interviews run for two months, Pro on monthly billing at $13.49 a month, per the pricing page, costs $26.98 for the project instead of $97.99 for the year.

FAQ

Can I interview someone who switches between two languages?

Yes, with bilingual transcription and translation. Every plan can use it four times a month across the workspace before an add-on is needed, per the plan guide.

Is the free plan enough to test this?

For the interface, yes; for an interview, no. Each recording stops at 3 minutes on Free, per the plan guide. The 7-day Business trial on the pricing page is the better test.

Can I export the original and the translation together?

Yes. When you download, the text type option offers the original, the translation or both, per the download article.