Best practices for importing media files into Interview Studies

Last updated: April 19, 2026

Maze Interview Studies allows your organization to streamline analysis and sharing of insights from user interviews.

After importing your interview recordings into Maze, a transcript is automatically generated, powered by Deepgram. From there, you can easily process your interviews, extract key learnings, and identify common themes across sessions.

This article walks you through best practices for uploading files and guaranteeing the quality of your transcriptions.

In this article:

How to import recordings

You can import recordings to Interview Studies manually, or through the Zoom integration.

Learn more about creating sessions and importing your recordings

Supported file types

We support the most common video and audio formats, including MP3, MP4, webm, Ogg, QuickTime, WAV, and others.

Uploaded video files must have audio—otherwise, the upload will fail.

File size and duration

  • You can upload files up to a maximum size of 1gb.
  • Files can have a maximum duration of 8 hours.
  • There is no limit to the number of sessions you can add to a study.
  • You can upload up to 100 recordings per month.

Tips for better transcriptions

Here are a few tips for a better quality transcription:

  • Minimize background noise as much as possible. Background noise can interfere with the quality and accuracy of the transcriptions. We recommend finding a quiet environment and/or using a noise-canceling microphone to improve the clarity of the audio.
  • Avoid talking at the same time as others. When multiple people are speaking simultaneously, it becomes very challenging to differentiate between speakers in the transcription. Encourage participants to take turns while speaking and avoid talking over one another.
  • Formulate sentences as clearly as possible. Strive to articulate your thoughts in well-formed and coherent sentences. Expressing your ideas clearly and concisely makes transcriptions easier to read and understand.

Supported languages

Maze automatically creates a transcript for interview recordings in 30+ languages. Learn more about the available language settings for transcripts

Deepgram has been trained on a range of global voices to make sure that the engine can accurately recognize and transcribe speech from different languages and accents.

It supports the following languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, English UK, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Mandarin Chinese (Simplified), Marathi, Nepali, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh.

Learn more in Deepgram's official documentation

The transcription providers only support single-language audio input. Please make sure the entire session is in one language to avoid gaps in the transcript. 

Troubleshooting

Why do I see a “Transcription failed” error?

In some cases, ‌automatic transcription may fail after uploading a file. For instance, if the imported file doesn’t have audio.

If you run into this issue, please delete the recording and re-upload a supported file.

If the issue persists, please let our team know.

Reporting issues

If you run into difficulties when uploading a file, or experience issues with the generated transcriptions, please let our team know.