Band 7.5 sample answer
I'll talk about something from last spring, when I was writing my master's thesis at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. My research was about how small fishing families on the Black Sea coast are coping with lower catches, and I had recorded twelve long interviews, each about an hour and a half, all in Turkish.
The task was to turn those recordings into written transcripts, which I needed before I could analyse anything. Doing it by hand, my supervisor estimated, would take about six hours for every hour of audio, so I was looking at more than a hundred hours of typing.
A friend suggested an AI transcription tool, the kind where you upload the audio file and it gives you the text with time stamps. I was sceptical, because the fishermen speak with a strong regional accent and use a lot of local words for boats and fish. And in fact the first version had plenty of mistakes, especially with those local words and with people talking over each other.
But it still saved me an enormous amount of time. Instead of typing everything from zero, I listened through each interview and corrected the text, which took roughly two hours per recording. I also had to be careful about privacy, so I checked that the files weren't stored after processing, and I removed people's names from the transcripts.
Would I use it again? Yes, definitely, but only as a first draft. I wouldn't trust it for anything where a single wrong word changes the meaning, like a quotation in a published paper. For me the lesson was that the tool does the boring part and I still have to do the thinking part.