TXT vs JSON transcript export: which one should you use?

Most apps that offer a choice of export format present it as a preference, something to set once and forget. It is worth treating as a real decision instead, because the two formats are not interchangeable — picking wrong means either fighting a wall of text later, or opening a file full of punctuation you did not want to deal with.

What a TXT export actually is

Plain text, readable by opening it in literally anything — Notes, a text editor, an email body, a text message. A TXT transcript export typically puts the recording's title, date, time and location above the words, then the transcript itself as continuous prose below. There is no structure beyond that: no fields, no separators a program could reliably split on, nothing but words in the order they were spoken.

That plainness is the whole point. A TXT file opens correctly on a phone, a Windows laptop, a Chromebook, or a device that has not been invented yet, because "plain text" has not changed in decades and is not going to. If the transcript's destination is a human being reading it — pasted into a document, forwarded as a text, dropped into a notes app — this is the format built for exactly that.

What a JSON export actually is

Structured data. Instead of one block of prose, a JSON transcript export keeps each piece separate: title, date, duration, and the transcript text itself all sit under their own field names, and where an app supports tags or a mood label on a recording, those come through as their own fields too. A script, a spreadsheet import, or another app can read exactly the field it wants without parsing sentences to find it.

The tradeoff is readability. Opened directly, a JSON file is technically plain text — you can read it in the same apps that open a TXT file — but it is dense with brackets, quotes and field names, which makes it slower for a person to just read than the same transcript exported as TXT. It was never written to be read directly; it was written to be read by code.

Picking based on what happens next

• Pasting into a document, an email, a message, or a notes app — TXT. Anything else forces you to strip formatting first.
• Feeding a transcript into a script, importing it into a spreadsheet by field, or building any kind of pipeline — JSON. The fields are already separated for you.
• Archiving a transcript so you, or something else, can parse it back apart later — JSON, because the metadata survives as data rather than as a line of text you would have to re-parse.
• Not sure yet what you will do with it — TXT. A human can always read it, and copying the words out of a TXT file into anything else costs nothing. Going the other way, extracting clean prose out of a JSON file by hand, is the more annoying direction.

What neither format gives you

Neither a TXT nor a JSON transcript export carries per-word or per-line timestamps — the transcript is exported as continuous text in both, not as timed segments. If what you actually need is subtitle timing, an SRT or VTT file, that is a different kind of export entirely, and one that voice recorder apps built around transcripts, rather than video, generally do not produce, because they never captured the timing data a subtitle format needs.

How Voice Studio exports each one

From any recording, exporting as a file gives you a choice between TXT and JSON — a setting, not a fixed default. The TXT export puts the title, date, time and location above the transcript as readable text. The JSON export keeps those, plus duration, mood and tags, as separate fields alongside the transcript. Sharing the audio itself is a third, separate option that exports the original .m4a rather than either text format.

These are per-recording exports, and they are distinct from the full backup in Settings, which is always one JSON file covering every recording's details and transcript at once, meant for restoring everything rather than for reading any single transcript. Choosing TXT for your day-to-day exports does not change what the full backup produces — that stays JSON either way, because a backup is data to be restored, not prose to be read.

If you are not sure which one you will need later

Export both. A transcript is a handful of kilobytes; keeping a TXT copy for reading and a JSON copy for anything structured costs almost nothing in storage and removes the guess entirely. The only real cost of exporting a format you never end up using is the few seconds it took to tap the option — trivial next to re-transcribing something later because the one export you kept was not in the shape you needed.

Common questions

Does the JSON export include the audio file?

No. Both TXT and JSON exports are text only. The recording itself exports separately, as the original .m4a, through its own share option.

Can I switch from TXT to JSON without re-exporting the recording?

The export format is a setting you choose per export, so you can export the same recording again in the other format at any time — nothing about the recording itself needs to change.

Is the full backup a TXT file or a JSON file?

JSON, always. The full backup in Settings writes one JSON file containing every recording's details and transcript, regardless of which format you have picked for individual exports.

Can I open a JSON transcript export like a normal text file?

Yes — a JSON file is plain text and opens in the same apps a TXT file does. It just reads as structured data with field names and punctuation rather than as a plain paragraph.