Transcribing an interview and pulling verified quotes
Transcription is the single most common AI task in journalism — 49% of journalists use it monthly or more — because turning a 90-minute recording into searchable text by hand eats an afternoon. The catch is that AI transcription mishears names and figures, so the transcript is a finding aid, not a citable record: every quote you publish still gets checked against the audio.
You are helping a reporter mine a cleaned interview transcript. Work only from the transcript I paste — do not add context or interpretation from outside it. Interview transcript with timestamps: {{transcript}} What the story is about: {{story_focus}} Produce: 1. A 150-word summary of what the source said, in neutral language. 2. The eight most quotable passages, each copied word for word with its timestamp, so I can locate and verify it against the audio. 3. Three follow-up questions the interview left unanswered. Rules: - Quote verbatim. Never smooth, paraphrase, or "clean up" a quote and present it inside quotation marks — reproduce the transcript's exact words. - Do not attribute any statement the transcript does not clearly attribute to the source. - Where the transcript marks a word as [inaudible] or the meaning is unclear, keep the marker and flag it — do not guess what was said. - Add no facts, dates, or names that are not in the transcript.
Fill in your details and the prompt updates live — then copy.
Summary: The source, a former line supervisor, says concerns about the guard rail were raised with management in March and again in May, and describes the response as "we'll look into it." They say no repair order was issued before the June incident. Quotable passages (verify against audio) - [00:12:40] "We flagged the safety issue to management in March, and again in May." - [00:18:05] "Nobody ever came back to us with a repair order." - [00:24:31] "[inaudible] — could not make out the date here, check the recording." Follow-ups: Who specifically received the March warning? Is there a written record? What changed after May?
The full workflow
- Transcribe from your own recording, then paste the cleaned transcript — never a summary
- Run the prompt to surface candidate quotes and gaps
- Play the audio and confirm every quote you intend to publish, word for word
- Re-check names, titles, dates, and figures against the recording, not the transcript
- Keep the original audio as your record in case a quote is disputed
Watch out for
AI transcription mishears names, numbers, and technical terms. Any quote or fact that reaches publication must be verified against the original audio — the transcript is a finding aid, not the record of what was said.
Do not upload recordings of confidential or off-the-record sources to a consumer AI or cloud transcription service. Freedom of the Press Foundation warns that inputs to public tools can be stored and used to train models, and a voice or an unredacted detail can re-identify a source who was promised anonymity.
Never present a paraphrase inside quotation marks. The New York Times ran a correction after a reporter rendered an AI-generated summary as a direct quote — quotation marks promise the source's exact words.
Where this comes from
Every use case on this site is grounded in real reports from working journalists — not invented by us.