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YES

As of 13 August 2026, AI can transcribe a job interview.

This still needs a person who signs their name to it.

Can you do it?

5 minutesto a draft.

30 minutesto something you’d act on.

Cost, all in£0

Skill needednone

Who has to check ita colleague

What the alternative costsOtter.ai is a purpose-built AI meeting-notes tool that records, transcribes and summarises meetings automatically.

If this goes wrong, a missed qualification, incorrect speaker label or exposed personal detail can affect the recruitment record and require the interview to be checked again.

What to actually do

  1. Hand it to a person

    The route this page recommends

    A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

  2. Use a tool built for this

    Second choice

  3. Do it yourself

    The distant third

    A chat interface, no skill needed, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

    How to actually do it

    1. Confirm that the interviewer and candidate were told about the recording and its recruitment use, and obtain any required internal approval before uploading it.
    2. Open an approved transcription tool such as Otter.ai or an approved chatbot, then check its account, storage and sharing settings for the interview recording.
    3. Upload the complete audio or video file and paste the prompt exactly as written.
    4. Read the generated transcript once while listening to the recording, correcting names, qualifications, dates, figures, speaker labels and every passage marked [unclear] or [overlap].
    5. Ask a colleague who attended the interview to compare the corrected transcript with the recording and resolve remaining speaker or wording disputes.
    6. Save the checked transcript only in the approved recruitment location, restrict access to authorised staff and delete the working upload if your retention process requires it.

    Prompt

    Transcribe the attached job interview recording for internal recruitment use in the UK.

Use a near-verbatim transcript. Add timestamps at sensible intervals and label speakers as Interviewer, Candidate and any other speaker you can identify. Do not invent words, fill gaps or infer what someone meant. Mark unclear audio as [unclear] and overlapping speech as [overlap]. Preserve names, qualifications, dates and figures exactly as spoken, but flag any passage that needs checking against the recording.

Do not summarise, score, rank or recommend the candidate. Do not make any claim about the candidate's suitability. At the end, provide a short list of timestamps where the audio is unclear, speakers are uncertain or factual details should be checked. Only process this recording where the participants have been told about the recording and its use, and do not retain or share the transcript beyond the approved recruitment process.

Return the transcript in plain text with speaker labels and timestamps.

    Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.

What it gets wrong

  • AI cannot obtain valid consent from the participants or decide whether your organisation is allowed to process the recording.
  • It cannot reliably resolve quiet speech, overlapping voices, accents, technical terms or ambiguous speaker changes without the recording being checked.
  • It cannot know whether a statement is factually accurate simply because it transcribes the words confidently.
  • It cannot take responsibility for how the transcript is stored, shared or used in a hiring decision.
  • It cannot replace the interviewer's judgement about what a candidate meant or how an answer should be assessed.

Even on a YES, the friction has a name: consent and privacy, verification cost and judgement under ambiguity.

How we scored this

Five axes, each scored nought to two by hand: ten means AI carries the task cleanly, and the thresholds that turn a total into YES, PARTLY or NO are published in the methodology. Each axis name links to its definition.

AxisScore (0–2)
Output2
Inputs2
Verification1
Liability1
Effort delta2
Total8 / 10

The methodology and its thresholds are published in full.

FAQ

Can AI transcribe a job interview?
Yes. It can produce a near-verbatim transcript with timestamps and attempted speaker labels from an interview recording. You still need permission to record and process the voices, then a person must check the transcript against the audio.
Is it legal to record a job interview in the UK?
Recording involves personal data, so you need a clear purpose, appropriate notice and an approved way to store and use it. This is not professional advice; ask your data protection officer or an employment solicitor about a serious or disputed case.
Can ChatGPT transcribe an interview?
A current chatbot may transcribe an uploaded recording, subject to its available file and account features. Use only an approved service for recruitment data, and instruct it to mark uncertainty rather than guess.
How accurate is AI transcription for interviews?
It is usually useful as a first draft, but accuracy varies with sound quality, accents, overlapping speech and specialist terms. Check every name, qualification, figure and disputed passage against the recording before using the transcript.

Nearby answers

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Assessed by gpt-5.6-luna (gpt-5.6-luna) on 2026-08-13, second-checked by an independent model. Wrong somewhere? Email [email protected] and it gets re-checked.

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