Research interviews
Transcripts your ethics form can explain.
Ethics forms ask where interview recordings go. With Quern the answer is short: the audio is recorded and transcribed on your iPhone, and it stays there until you export it. No transcription service, no cloud account, and no third party to name as a processor.
Free for 30 days, then £19.99 once. No subscription. Requires iPhone 15 Pro or later.
What to write on the forms.
Adapt these to your institution's templates, and check them with your ethics committee and data protection officer. They describe what Quern does; they don't make any approval for you.
Participant information sheet
Interviews will be audio recorded on the researcher's iPhone and transcribed on that device by an app called Quern. The recording and transcript are not sent to any transcription service or other third party.
Data management plan
Transcription uses Apple's on-device speech recognition; no audio leaves the device during transcription. Recordings are exported to [university storage] and deleted from the device after [period]. The device is passcode-protected, and the app's data is excluded from iCloud Backup.
On AI transcription and consent, see Samuel and Wassenaar's 2025 editorial.
From recording to analysis.
What Quern does between the interview and your coding software, and where you still need to step in.
- Verbatim, or clean
- Verbatim keeps every um, repeat and false start; Clean hides them for reading. The recording doesn't change.
- Speaker tags
- Quern separates interviewer and participant. Rename them to codes such as P07, and every line follows.
- Pseudonyms
- Change a name to a pseudonym everywhere it appears in the transcript. The audio still contains the real name.
- Timed text out
- Export Markdown or PDF with speakers and timestamps, or SRT and VTT subtitles, to take into your own tools.
Still yours to do.
Keeping the audio on the phone deals with the transcription service. It doesn't deal with these.
Consent
Tell participants how they'll be recorded and transcribed, in the information sheet and again on the day.
Backups
Quern's recordings are in the iPhone's iCloud and computer backups if those are on. Leave Quern out of iCloud Backup, or turn on Advanced Data Protection.
Storage
Export each interview to the storage your plan names, then delete it from the phone when the plan says.
Checking
Speech recognition makes mistakes. Check the transcript against the audio before you quote or code from it.
Questions
Anything else: support, or [email protected]
Is Quern approved by my university?
Not by any university in particular, and it holds no certification. What it can give your ethics committee is a simple answer about where the data goes: nowhere but the iPhone, unless you export it. Whether that's enough is their decision and your data protection officer's.
Is the transcript good enough for analysis?
Treat it as a first draft. The UK Data Service describes the usual approach: speech recognition for a first pass on good-quality audio, then editing for turn-taking, speaker tags and accuracy. Quern makes the checking quicker, because every word plays back from where it was said.
Can I anonymise the transcript in Quern?
Partly. Rename speakers to participant codes, and change a name to a pseudonym everywhere it appears in the transcript. The audio still has the real name in it, so exported audio isn't anonymised, and places, employers and other details still need your attention.
What about focus groups?
Quern tells voices apart, and you can tell it how many people were there and merge or move speakers it gets wrong. The more people talk over each other, the more correcting that takes, so try it on a practice session before you rely on it.
Which languages?
Wherever Apple's on-device speech recognition supports the language; choose it before the interview if it isn't your iPhone's. Summaries are written in that language where Apple Intelligence supports it.
What does it cost?
Free for 30 days with everything working, then £19.99 once. No subscription and no per-minute charge, which makes it easier to budget for in a grant. It needs iPhone 15 Pro or later.
Free for 30 days.
Then £19.99, once.
Out 19 October on the App Store
- First 30 days
- Free, everything works
- Then
- £19.99, once
- Subscription
- None
- Family Sharing
- Included
- If you don't unlock it
- Your recordings stay yours to play, read and export