Twenty hours
A while ago I worked on a big project for a national cancer charity. Part of it was around twenty hours of one-to-one interviews. Some with donors. Some with people living with the disease.
They were some of the most intense conversations I’ve had in this job. There was anger at a system people felt had let them down. There was grief from people who had lost someone they loved. And there was a huge amount of goodness. The generosity of Irish people, the way they turn up for each other, still stops me in my tracks.
The transcript
I don’t transcribe interviews by hand anymore. Technology records every word, writes a synopsis of each conversation and pulls the recurring themes together. What used to take days of typing now takes an afternoon.
That time back is real, and I’m glad of it. But it’s worth being clear about what a transcript is. It’s the words. Only the words.
The tools do the typing. They don't do the listening.
And when you’re talking to a machine instead of a person, something human goes missing from the answers too.
Hope
At one point, the team was weighing up hope as the angle for the whole platform. It felt right. It’s what charities in this space often reach for.
So I asked one woman, who was living with cancer, what hope meant to her. She got angry. Properly angry.
We don't need hope. We don't want hope. We want action, we want answers, we want results.
What the room knew
Read that line in a transcript and it’s a strong quote. Sitting across from her, it was something else. The heat in her voice. The sense of someone who had been patient for far too long. You don’t just hear that. You carry it out of the room with you.
No AI picks that up. It can tag the sentiment as negative. It can’t feel the weight of it, know to stay quiet a second longer, or ask the next question in the right tone. That’s what being in the room gives you. You read the body language, catch the pause before an answer, and test how strongly someone really feels.
Who the work answers to
That conversation changed the work. The idea moved away from hope and towards action. From then on, every piece had a new test. It had to stand up in my eyes and in the client’s. But it also had to stand up in hers. She was who we were representing.
Some markets are now replacing interviews with AI. A bot asks the questions, another bot reads the answers. It’s quicker, and I understand the appeal. But some things you can’t shortcut. When someone is talking about a life-threatening illness, you give them time, space and a real person to talk to. I’d hate to see us trade that away for efficiency.
Words and weight
So yes, I stopped transcribing. The tools take down the words and save me days. I spend those days on what the tools can’t do.
Being there. Listening.