Transcribe your interviews. Keep them off other people's servers.
Your participants agreed to be recorded by you, not by a transcription company. Ratproof turns the recording into text on your own computer, and the file never leaves it.
Why committees ask about transcription
A cloud transcription service receives a copy of every recording. For an ethics committee, that is sharing participant data with a third party, and it has to be described, justified and often refused.
Ratproof never receives the recording. The speech model runs inside your browser, on your computer. There is nothing to share, and nothing to install, so it works on a managed university laptop.
What universities say
-
Northwestern's IRB lists, among suitable options for transcribing participants:
Software that runs locally on your computer without an internet connection
(April 2026). -
Harvard Library says the Whisper model
should be downloaded … so that audio is kept to your local machine
, and that sending audio to OpenAI's API is not appropriate for sensitive data. -
Georgia State's IRB says researchers using AI transcription services
must describe these plans in the IRB application as a data sharing practice
.
Ratproof runs on your computer. Install it and it saves everything it needs, so it works with the internet switched off.
The statement for your ethics application
Copy this into the data-handling section. Fill in the parts in brackets.
Audio recordings will be transcribed with Ratproof (app.ratproof.app), which runs the speech-recognition model inside the web browser on the researcher's own computer. The recordings and transcripts are not sent to the tool's provider or to any third party, and no account is created.
The page is served with the header Content-Security-Policy: connect-src 'self', which tells the browser to block the page's code from connecting to any other server. This can be checked in the browser's developer tools, and the tool keeps working with the network disconnected.
Transcripts are kept in the browser's storage on [the researcher's encrypted university laptop]. They will be exported to [the approved secure storage] and deleted from the browser [when transcription is complete]. The researcher will check each transcript against the recording, because automatic transcription contains errors.
Keep it factual. Don't add that the tool is "approved" or "compliant": committees approve your research plan, not tools. Some universities also want participants to agree to the transcription tool, so name Ratproof in your consent form if yours does.
Built for a stack of interviews
- Long recordings. Text appears as it goes, with timestamps.
- Click any line to hear it. Checking a quote takes seconds.
- Export as text, Markdown, subtitles or JSON for your analysis software.
- Every transcript kept on your computer, in one place.
Transcription is free and unlimited. Ratproof Pro ($9.99 a month) adds speaker labels on whole recordings, adding many recordings at once, and search across every transcript you keep.
Questions
Can I use AI transcription for research interviews?
Some universities list software that runs on your own computer as a suitable option, and some require approval for any AI tool. Ratproof transcribes on your own computer, so the recording never leaves it. Your committee makes the final call, so name the tool in your application.
Is Ratproof approved by my IRB or ethics committee?
No tool is approved in general. Committees approve your plan for handling data. The statement on this page describes what Ratproof does, so your committee can judge it.
Do I still need to check the transcript?
Yes. About 9 in every 100 words differ from a human transcript on hard English meeting audio. Check quotes against the recording before you use them. Click any line to hear it.
Does it work for interviews in other languages?
Yes, in Spanish, Italian and Swedish as well as English. Choose the language before you transcribe.