Whisper Memos vs. Otter.ai

Testing Mobile Transcription Apps for EFL Student Interviews: A Small-Scale Experiment

In my ongoing work with undergraduate EFL students, I regularly conduct short interviews to better understand how they are making sense of their learning experiences. Recently, I wanted to find a practical way to audio-record these conversations on my phone and generate transcripts that reflect my students’ actual speech patterns. This wasn’t a search for polished, cleaned-up text; it was a search for accuracy, texture, and authenticity. I wanted a tool that could handle the unpredictability of real classroom talk — the quiet voices, the hesitations, the multilingual spillovers — without assuming that English should sound a certain way. To explore what might work, I conducted a small experiment comparing two widely available mobile tools.

The Context: Real Students, Real Voices

My interviews rarely take place under ideal audio conditions. Students speak with varying levels of confidence, often softly, and often with rhythm and phrasing shaped by Korean. My own voice, meanwhile, is louder and more easily captured by any microphone. These dynamics matter because transcription is never just a mechanical transfer of sound to text — it is always an act of representation. A tool that picks up only my side of the conversation or attempts to “correct” the student’s grammar isn’t simply inaccurate; it’s distorting. The value of the transcript lies in its ability to preserve the spoken moment as it is lived: uneven, accented, tentative, expressive. Any app I use must be attentive to this reality, not erase it.

Testing Whisper Memos vs. Otter.ai

Whisper Memos (and other mobile Whisper apps)

  • Accuracy is strong in ideal recording conditions

  • Struggles with quiet student voices

  • Sometimes smooths or “fixes” grammar

  • No reliable speaker diarization

  • Best for solo dictation, not two-speaker interviews

Otter.ai (Free Tier)

  • Automatically identifies and separates speakers

  • Handles uneven voice volume well

  • Preserves hesitations, fillers, and accented English

  • Learns voices over the course of a conversation

  • Best suited for natural, real-world classroom talk

Why This Matters for Literacy Education

This small experiment underscored how deeply transcription tools participate in the work of literacy. When a model reshapes student speech to fit standardized English, it imposes an ideology rather than recording an interaction. In contrast, a tool that captures hesitations, pauses, and accented phrasing allows the transcript to function as a record of meaning-making, not a shadow of correctness. For multilingual learners, these traces — what might look like errors to some — are actually the clearest windows into identity, intention, and linguistic development. Choosing a transcription tool, then, becomes a pedagogical decision: it determines whose voice becomes legible and whose complexities remain intact.

What I’ll Use Going Forward

For now, I plan to continue using Otter.ai for my student interviews and will position the phone slightly closer to the student to balance volume. I’ll also begin each conversation with a short warmup exchange to help the app distinguish our voices. This approach aligns with how I think about voice and identity more broadly. Bakhtin reminds us that every utterance is shaped by the social world and by the voices that precede and surround it. Holland and her colleagues emphasize how identity is formed in these dialogic moments, where people author themselves in relation to others. And Bettina Love pushes us to remember that representation is political — that how we choose to record, interpret, and share student voice reflects our commitments to justice, dignity, and care.

Using Otter feels like a small but meaningful way to honor these commitments.

References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. University of Texas Press.

Holland, D., Lachicotte Jr., W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Harvard University Press.

Love, B. L. (2019). We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Beacon Press.


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