Sound familiar?
Whether it is a journalist recording on a phone or a researcher with a Zoom archive, interview audio tends to arrive messy:
Interviewer and subject share one track
Everything was captured on a single mic or a mono Zoom export. When you want just the subject's answer — without your own questions and "mm-hmms" underneath — there is no clean way to get it. You end up manually chopping around your own voice and hoping the overlaps are short.
The interview happened in the real world
Cafés, conferences, cars, echoey offices. The background noise is glued to the voices on one track, so lifting the speech means fighting the room. Blanket noise reduction dulls the very words you are trying to feature.
You need one clean quote for a clip
A single strong line needs to go into an article audiogram, a social clip, or a highlight reel — but pulling it out means the other speaker bleeds into the moment. Without an isolated track, the clean pull-quote you pictured is not actually clean.
Overlapping speakers wreck the transcript
Transcription tools mislabel and drop words when two people talk at once on one channel. Garbled speaker labels mean you re-check the whole transcript by hand, which defeats the point of automating it in the first place.
How it works
Upload the interview recording — even a single mono file from a phone or Zoom export works.
The AI isolates the interviewer and each subject into separate, clearly labelled tracks.
Keep, mute, or clip any speaker, then export the clean audio or send it on to transcription.
How SplitBySpeakers helps
SplitBySpeakers turns one messy interview recording into clean, per-speaker audio:
Every speaker on their own track
Upload the recording and get an isolated file for the interviewer and each subject. Now you can mute your own questions, feature just the subject, or balance two voices that were recorded at wildly different levels — all as simple per-track edits.
Lift voices out of the room
Separating speakers also pulls their speech away from background music and room tone, so a field interview recorded in a café or a car sounds far closer to a studio take. You keep the clarity of the words without scrubbing the whole file with heavy noise reduction that dulls every voice on it.
Clean quotes, ready to clip
With each person isolated, exporting one speaker's line for an audiogram, podcast, or social clip is trivial — no bleed from the other side of the conversation sneaking into your highlight. Grab the exact sentence you want and it comes out clean, with nothing to edit around.
Better input for transcription
Feed the separated tracks to Otter, Descript, or any transcription tool and you get far cleaner, correctly-attributed text. SplitBySpeakers handles the audio; your transcription tool handles the words.
Interview cleanup FAQ
How do I separate two speakers in an interview recording?
Upload the recording to SplitBySpeakers. Its AI detects each distinct voice and exports an isolated audio track per speaker — even when the interviewer and subject were recorded on the same mic or channel.
Can I isolate just the interviewee?
Yes. Once the recording is split into per-speaker tracks, you can keep only the subject's track and drop the interviewer entirely — useful for quotes, clips, and clean pull-audio.
Does SplitBySpeakers transcribe the interview?
No — it separates the audio. For the transcript, pair it with a tool like Otter.ai or Descript. Feeding them clean, separated tracks usually improves transcription accuracy and speaker labelling.
Does it work with phone or Zoom interview recordings?
Yes. Export the audio (or the whole recording) as MP3, WAV, M4A, or a supported video file up to 100MB, and SplitBySpeakers will separate the speakers on it.
Does it work for group interviews and panels?
Yes. SplitBySpeakers separates up to five distinct speakers per recording, so a roundtable or small panel splits into individual tracks the same way a two-person interview does. When people talk over each other, each voice still lands on its own track — which is exactly what makes the overlapping sections editable and the transcript far more accurate.
Is there a free version?
No — SplitBySpeakers is paid, from $19/mo, with a money-back guarantee so you can run a real interview through it before committing.