Creating an article from an interview

In Interview Mode an article is not built from a keyword alone, but from your own knowledge. You state the goal of the article, the AI asks you questions about it, and you answer them by typing or speaking. The questions and answers then go into the article generation. That way your figures, examples and experience end up in the text, things an AI on its own cannot know.

Where to find it

Open Content → AI Content Editor → New article. At the top of the first step you'll see the Interview Mode card. Click it to open the interview. The usual way without an interview stays unchanged below it.

The interview has three steps: Goal, Questions and Responses. The step indicator at the top shows where you are.

Step 1: State the goal

Under What should the article achieve? describe in a sentence or two whom the article should reach and what it should achieve. An example: "Homeowners should understand when a heat pump pays off in an older building, and contact us as a specialist company." The Main keyword is optional, but it helps the AI find suitable questions.

Then you have two options:

• Let the AI suggest questions: the AI writes up to seven questions about your goal. Some are asked from the point of view of an interviewer talking to a company, some from the point of view of an expert.
• Write questions yourself: you continue without a suggestion and write the questions yourself.

The suggestion runs in the background. You can leave the page; the questions will be there the next time you open it.

Step 2: Adjust the questions

The questions are listed under Your interview questions. Suggestions from the AI are marked suggested by the AI. For every question you can

• reword it directly in the field,
• move it up or down with the arrows,
• delete it,
• mark it as a Required question or remove that mark.

Add your own question and Add question add a question of your own. If the suggestions are not enough, More questions from the AI fetches new ones. They are appended at the bottom; questions you have already edited stay as they are, and a question with the same wording is not added twice. An interview can have at most 20 questions.

Continue to the answers takes you to the last step.

Step 3: Type or speak your answers

Every question has its own answer field. A typed answer is saved as soon as you leave the field, so switching pages loses nothing. The more specific the answer, the more the article becomes your own: examples, figures and experience from your daily work help most.

A bar at the top shows the progress, for example "3 of 7 questions answered".

Recording an answer

Instead of typing, you can speak any answer:

1. Click Record answer next to the question.
2. Before the first recording of an interview, the notice Before you speak appears (see below). Confirm it with Understood, start recording or choose Rather type.
3. The first time, your browser asks whether Rankion may use the microphone. Allow it.
4. Speak your answer and click Stop recording.
5. The recording is converted into text. This usually takes a few seconds; meanwhile you can keep working on other questions or leave the page.
6. The text appears in the answer field. If there was already something in it, the text is appended. You can then edit it like a typed answer.

Voice input works in current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. If it does not work, the page tells you why, for example: no microphone found, microphone access was denied, or the recording was empty. If you denied access, you can allow it again in your browser settings. Typing always works.

Privacy for voice recordings

Before the first recording of an interview the page shows a notice: your recording is sent to a service provider in the USA to be converted into text and is deleted at Rankion right after the conversion. Only the text is stored, and you can still change it afterwards. So don't record any confidential data about third parties. The service provider is listed among the processors and in the privacy policy.

Creating the article

Below the answers you choose the main keyword, the article type, Length, Tone and Salutation, just as for a normal article. Create article only becomes clickable once every required question has an answer and no recording is still being converted. Until then the page says: "Answer all required questions first." Questions without the required mark may stay open.

Generation runs in the background like for any article; you can leave the page. Goal, questions and answers go into the outline and the text as a briefing. Once the article has been created, Go to article takes you there.

After generation the interview can no longer be changed, but you can still read it: at the bottom of the interview page, Earlier interviews lists your finished interviews. For another article, Start a new interview begins a fresh one.

Continuing an interview later

You don't have to finish an interview in one go. When you open Interview Mode again, you land in your most recent open interview of this project, in the same step and with all questions and answers.

What it costs

Typed answers and questions you write yourself are free. Credits are only deducted once a step has worked; a failed suggestion or a failed conversion costs nothing. If your balance is too low, the page tells you beforehand.

Via the API

The whole flow is also available through the REST API. The most important endpoints:

An audio file may be at most 10 MB and must be in webm, ogg, m4a, mp4, mp3 or wav format. There are further endpoints to edit, delete, add and reorder questions. The full list is in the API documentation; for signing in see Authentication.

Read more

• Your first article with the AI Content Editor
• AI Content Editor: the module at a glance