Mon – Fri 9.00 am – 3.00 pm
+49 (0) 6421 590979-0
info@audiotranskription.de
Team & History
Mon – Fri 9.00 am – 3.00 pm
+49 (0) 6421 590979-0
info@audiotranskription.de
audio transcription
dr.dresing & pehl GmbH
Deutschhausstrasse 22a
35037 Marburg | DE
20 years of experience
Having started out as graduate educators from the University of Marburg, we now have almost 20 years of industry experience with our problem solutions developed from practical experience and are experts in our field. We offer didactically well-designed and easy-to-use software solutions that provide reliable and fast support for transcribing speech and analyzing texts. We also develop transcription rule systems that are used in many scientific research projects.
Our corporate culture is based on trust, respect and team spirit and we have been working together for more than 15 years. We are respectful both internally and externally, are authentic and helpful and always act as equals. All the software products we offer are Made in Germany. We attach great importance to the protection of your data and consciously work in compliance with the GDPR.
Heidi Neubauer
Network licenses, accounting, f-pro key account
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Helmut Neubauer
Programming & Web, Software Support
Extension -19
Christoph Burgdorf
Programming, Linux & f4transcript support
Extension -17
Dr. Thorsten Dresing
Transcription & Qualitative Data Analysis, Management
Extension -12
Thorsten Pehl
Qualitative content analysis, data protection & speech recognition, management
Extension -16
2004 - 2024
Necessity is the mother of invention. Our company history also shows this: it begins in 2004, when our Managing Director Dr. Thorsten Dresing was asked to type up twenty recorded interviews for his dissertation. With the desire to minimize the time and effort required, he sets out in search of a user-friendly, digital solution. But in vain. So he introduces his fellow student Thorsten Pehl, our second managing director, to the subject. The two student friends eventually got together with some computer science students, one of whom was Helmut Neubauer, who is still a permanent employee today. They are developing initial ideas for programming simple, functional software that will put an end to their transcription suffering and that of future students.
No sooner said than done. The first version of f4transkript is born and its function is already very promising. What is still missing is a foot control to operate the software intuitively. So the two inventors decide to invest a not inconsiderable amount of equity for students in the production of their own USB foot switches and set up their own small company. In March 2005, the self-made homepage with a simple order form and free download function of the f4transcript software goes online. The living rooms of our managing directors are quickly converted into offices and storage rooms and the first USB footswitches are sold. The first 500 switches were sold after one year and many tens of thousands have been sold to date. In 2009, our managing directors Dr. Thorsten Dresing and Thorsten Pehl won the Hessian Founder’s Prize in the “Intelligent Business Idea” category and drew the attention of the regional media to audiotranskription. You can find out more from the perspective (2012) in this press article, for example.
f4analysis, f4transcript & f4x
A lot has happened since then. E.g. As early as 2006, there were suddenly people who wanted the technology we used in the foot controls to be built into other pushbuttons, for example. in a red buzzer, as we know it from various TV shows or in production lines, as alarm signaling devices in public authorities, on the live stage at concerts, on ultrasound devices in doctors’ surgeries, etc. These also trigger other commands on the computer instead of the play pause. And to this day, there are still customers for our switches who come from completely non-university backgrounds and for whom we have developed our very own website: www.f-pro.de (programmable USB switches).
From 2006 to 2014, we also offered digital recording devices and wrote very extensive and demanding test reports on almost all relevant digital recorders. These were read hundreds of thousands of times and at times we sold more recording devices than the largest online retailers (according to information from Olympus, for example). This area once accounted for more than half of our turnover. But here, too, the market continued to develop, became saturated at some point, price wars intensified and so we decided to give up this area completely in 2015.
(Sales) software became more important for us. In 2012, f4transkript became chargeable and in 2013 we added our second software, f4analyse, a program for the qualitative analysis of text files. The guiding principle here was the desire to offer a deliberately simple product with few but central functions that would make beginners in the field of qualitative social research in particular feel right at home.
But back to the transcription. Let’s be honest, almost nobody actually liked or wants to type up interviews themselves. The most frequently asked question at conferences was therefore “when will it finally be automatic?”. However, automatic speech recognition could not be used for interview data before 2019. You can no longer really imagine that today, because fortunately our ki-based, fully automated and, above all, GDPR-compliant solution f4x has been available since 2019. With its current 2023 version, it is the absolute star in our portfolio.
The really good functioning of f4x, i.e. automatic speech recognition, was also one of the reasons why we discontinued our manual typing service in 2022. Until then, we had had two permanent employees and around 30 freelance typists for over 12 years, with whom we had manually transcribed over 1000 hours of interviews for research projects each year in compliance with the GDPR.
We are very proud to count 150,000 people and companies from a wide range of industries (including business, research, media, legal and healthcare) among our customers. At around two thirds, the majority of them come from the university environment. Departments at almost all universities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland have campus licenses for audiotranskription and make our software available to their students as a standard work tool. So these are still used today in the classic way for the purpose for which we invented them in 2004: to support people’s work in transcribing and evaluating their (interview) recordings.