gov2ai MENAPOINT Conference Iraq 718–20 September 2026 · Erbil, Iraq

By role

Journalist or editor

You are the one working to a deadline with material you cannot fully verify yet.

This is you if you record interviews, chase claims you cannot confirm, and publish in more than one language.

What your week looks like

Two hours of recorded interview, a video somebody swears is from last week, an editor waiting, and a piece that has to run in Arabic and Kurdish as well. Your sources trusted you with their voice, and their voice is on your phone.

Start with these three tasks

  1. Transcribing testimonies and interviews
  2. Verifying images, video and claims
  3. Translation into and out of local languages

Tools you can actually afford

The tool that matters most to you, transcription on your own laptop, is also the free one. It is open source, and it never sends the audio anywhere.

  • Whisper (running on your own computer)

    Safe for sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks offlineWorks in Iraq

  • ChatGPT

    Never for sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq

  • Claude

    Never for sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq

  • Google Gemini

    Never for sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq

  • DeepL

    Careful with sensitive materialHas a free versionWorks in Iraq

  • Check (by Meedan)

    Careful with sensitive materialHas a free versionWe do not know whether it works in Iraq

Never do this

  • Never publish a quote from an AI transcript without listening back to the audio. Transcription tools misread names, places and negations, and a wrong negation reverses what your source said.
  • Never ask a chatbot whether a photo or video is real. It will answer confidently and it does not know. Verification is checking the source, the metadata and the original.
  • Never upload a source’s recording to a cloud tool if that source’s safety depends on nobody knowing they spoke to you.

Your first hour

  1. 20 minutes. Install a transcription tool that runs on your own laptop, using a recording that contains nothing sensitive.
  2. 20 minutes. Transcribe five minutes of it, then listen back and mark every error. Pay attention to names and to the word “not”.
  3. 10 minutes. Time yourself: how long did the whole loop take against typing it out? That number is what you take to your editor, not a claim from a vendor.
  4. 10 minutes. Agree one rule with your editor, for example that no quote is published from a transcript alone. Write it down.

Case studies

Recipes

Last checked: 2026-08-31