You are six months into your dissertation. Forty interviews completed. Your IRB protocol is solid, or so you thought. Then a committee member asks one question: "Who transcribed these interviews, and how did they access the files?" Your stomach drops. You uploaded everything to a freelancer you found online. No NDA. No security clearance. No idea what just happened to your participants' confidential healthcare stories. This happens more often than anyone wants to admit. Transcription lives in the shadow of research design — necessary enough to need, easy enough to overlook until it becomes a real problem. Here are the five mistakes that derail research projects.

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that "can I use AI transcription" is actually the wrong question. The question your IRB is asking is whether your transcription workflow, AI or otherwise, adequately protects your participants. That's a platform-specific question, not a yes-or-no about AI in general.

Spanish interview audio is not one problem. It's a dozen overlapping ones: which dialect, how fast the speaker talks, whether the moderator and respondent are in the same language, how many people are talking over each other, and whether the finished transcript needs to survive IRB review or a legal proceeding. Most transcription services handle one or two of those well. A few handle all of them.