I use Pop Up Archive to transcribe interviews. I don't know if it's the best option, but it does a terrific job of capturing the gist of what was said in an interview, and as a consultant, my clients love being able to read, rather than listen to the interview. I typically move it over to a shared Google Doc and highlight/comment on notable moments. While it can garble it in places, I don't find it worthwhile to edit it for accuracy. When there's a particularly badly-transcribed sentence that's relevant, it includes timestamps that let me go back and correct it by hand.

We don't transcribe entire user interviews. Usually there's the facilitator, a recorder, and then another designer/researcher is the notetaker. A lot of the time we aren't allowed a recorder though do to the nature of our work.

I prefer just having another person as a notetaker, instead of a full transcription, since it really lets me focus on the interview, and the other designer/researcher to focus on key notes. We can then go back and ask additional questions right on the spot easily.

As I had experience with both ways (not transcribing entire interviews + transcribing them) - I see the following pros + cons:

Pros of transcribing interviews: + you have the entire interview at your finger tip, searching for certain words is easy when you have the entire interview. + people do not listen to the audio files (at least that's my experience) + having a written document helps to provide further context

Cons of transcribing interviews: - transcribing takes time (or costs money) - some transcripts might never be used

All in all, I think that it's more important to have a summary of the key points of each interview somewhere easily accessible.

I've used rev.com in the past for transcribing user interviews. It's a great service and works super fast (usually you get the ready transcript within 24 hours).

I'm very close to trying https://cloud.google.com/speech/ anyone have experience with that?

I've used Rev to transcribe interviews in the past. The service adds timestamps every minute, makes it easy to find and pull clips.