Sign up for free. No credit card required. You get 3 hours of recording time to experience how StorySeeker tracks your growth across multiple interviews.

Start by clicking "New Interview" from your dashboard. Write your questions in the Interview Questions tab, fill in Story Setup with your interviewee's background and story angle, select your audio source, and press Start.

As you record, watch the Transcript panel for live transcription, check the Coaching tab for AI-generated follow-up suggestions, and monitor Live Notes for auto-structured notes with notable moment flagging.

When you're done, press Stop and run the post-interview analysis to get a summary of strengths, missed opportunities, and patterns. Export everything as Markdown, CSV, or SRT.

Your dashboard is the home base for all your interviews. It shows every interview you've created, with status badges (draft, recording, completed), duration, and creation date.

Use the search bar to find interviews by transcript text, questions, goals, notes, or coaching suggestions. Filter by status, project, or tags, and sort by recent, oldest, name, or duration.

The usage widget in the sidebar shows your remaining recording time for the month with a visual progress bar.

Click the "Interview Questions" tab to prepare before you record. Use the built-in rich text editor to write your questions, organize them by topic, and format with headings, bold, italic, and lists.

During the interview, you can reference your questions in a read-only view and cross them off as you cover each topic.

Before recording, select your conversation type from the dropdown in the top bar. StorySeeker supports Video Interview, Pre-Production Interview, Testimonial, Podcast, and Technical Demo. Each one tailors the AI coaching tone to match your format.

Before you hit record, click "Story Setup" to brief the AI about your interviewee, your story objective, and your target audience. This context shapes the coaching suggestions and notes the AI generates during your conversation.

You can also set the estimated duration (15 to 240 minutes) so the AI paces its suggestions accordingly. The more context you provide, the more relevant your coaching will be.

Click "Schedule Interview" from the dashboard to set up a future interview. Choose your date, time, and timezone, and set the meeting duration (30 minutes to 2 hours).

For virtual interviews, paste your meeting URL (Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams) and StorySeeker auto-detects the platform. For in-person or local interviews, leave the meeting URL blank.

StorySeeker warns you about scheduling conflicts with existing interviews. Once scheduled, your interview appears on the dashboard with a countdown timer.

Important: Virtual interview scheduling requires a Pro or Studio plan.

Within a Project, click "Prep" on any non-completed interview to generate an AI-written pre-call brief tailored to that conversation. The brief includes "Where You Stand" (what the project has so far), the Top 3 Priorities to capture in this call, and a "Watch For" section with specific cues to listen for.

If you've drafted questions in the Interview Questions tab, the prep brief reviews each one and labels it Keep, Sharpen, Skip, or Promote so you walk in with a sharper version of your own plan.

If the question editor is empty, the prep brief instead generates a 8-10 question starter script you can paste into your interview plan and run with. Every question is load-bearing: no generic warmups, no rapport filler. The interviewer handles social runway off-mic.

For interviews in a Production project that was forked from pre-production, the prep brief automatically pulls in past conversations with the same person from the source project, so the AI knows what's already been covered.

Choose your microphone from the Audio Source dropdown in the top bar. For best results, use an external microphone plugged directly into your computer. If your subject is speaking through your computer's built-in mic, make sure they're close enough for clear capture. Poor audio quality leads to poor transcription results.

Due to OS-level security restrictions, StorySeeker cannot capture audio from apps like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet directly. For remote interviews, use the built-in Virtual Call feature (Pro+) which sends a Recall.ai bot into the meeting and records everything for you.

Audio recording: if you leave "Save audio recording" on in Story Setup (default), a copy of the full session is saved to your account so you can play it back, download it, or share it later. Free trial recordings are kept for 30 days; paid plans keep them as long as your subscription is active. This is archival quality, good for review and personal sharing; for broadcast use, run a dedicated recorder alongside.

Press Start and your transcript will begin appearing within about 15 seconds. The AI needs a moment to warm up. Use Pause to temporarily stop recording during breaks, and Resume to continue. Press Stop to end the recording session.

The top bar shows your elapsed recording time, a real-time audio level meter, and a REC indicator. If no audio signal is detected for 3 seconds, a "no signal" warning appears.

As you talk, the AI Coaching panel suggests follow-up questions based on what's being said. These appear every few minutes, with the most recent suggestion at the top. Use them to dig deeper into moments that matter for your story.

Coaching suggestions are shaped by your Story Setup context. The more detail you provide about your interviewee and story angle, the more targeted the suggestions become.

The Live Notes panel auto-generates structured notes as the conversation progresses. Notes are organized into titled groups with bullet points and timestamps.

Key moments are flagged as notable moments. Look for the gold dot indicator. These are the most compelling, emotional, or surprising moments the AI identifies during your interview.

StorySeeker supports interviews in 50+ languages. Simply speak in the language of your conversation and the app adapts automatically. Transcription, AI coaching suggestions, live notes, and post-interview analysis will all respond in the same language being spoken.

This works because the underlying speech-to-text (OpenAI Whisper) and AI models natively understand dozens of languages. You do not need to change any settings. StorySeeker detects the spoken language from the audio and adjusts accordingly.

A few things to keep in mind: the app interface (buttons, labels, menus) remains in English. Transcription accuracy is highest for widely spoken languages like French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Japanese, and Mandarin, and may be less accurate for lower-resource languages. Mixed-language interviews (switching between two languages mid-conversation) generally work but may occasionally affect coaching context.

When a scheduled virtual interview starts, StorySeeker sends an AI bot to join your Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams call. The bot transcribes the conversation in real-time and streams the transcript back to your StorySeeker session.

The virtual interview page shows the connection status (joining, in call, recording), live transcript, and coaching suggestions, just like a local recording. You don't need to share your screen or install any additional software.

Important: Virtual interviews require a Pro or Studio plan. The bot joins at the scheduled time and automatically ends when the meeting concludes.

After stopping your recording, click "Analyze" to generate a comprehensive AI analysis. The analysis identifies your strengths, missed opportunities, and patterns across the conversation.

Each analysis includes coaching scores for 6 skill areas: Question Quality, Follow-Up Depth, Tension & Stakes, Evidence, Active Listening, and Emotional Depth. These scores feed into your Insights dashboard to track growth over time.

Click the Export button in the top bar to download your interview data. Choose which sections to include: transcript, coaching suggestions, interview plan/questions, live notes, and analysis.

Export in three formats: Markdown (.md) for formatted documents, CSV (.csv) for spreadsheets and data analysis, or SRT (.srt) for subtitle files with timestamps. Preview your compiled document before downloading.

The dashboard provides powerful tools for managing your interview library. Use the search bar to find interviews by transcript content, questions, goals, notes, or coaching suggestions.

Filter interviews by status (draft, recording, completed, archived), by assigned project, or by tags. Sort by most recent, oldest, name, or duration to quickly find what you need. Rename interviews inline by clicking their title.

Add tags to any interview from the sidebar menu. Right-click an interview or use the three-dot menu. Tags help you organize interviews across projects by topic, subject, or any custom category.

Filter your dashboard by tag to see all related interviews at once. Combine tag filters with status and project filters for precise organization.

Archive interviews you're finished with to keep your dashboard clean. Archived interviews move to a separate section in the sidebar and can be restored at any time.

If you accidentally delete an interview, visit the Account page to find your recently deleted interviews. You can restore them before they're permanently removed.

Projects let you group related interviews under a shared goal. Click "New Project" from the dashboard and provide a title, goal/objective, and success criteria.

When you create a project, choose its phase: Pre-production (discovery, casting, exploratory interviews) or Production (on-camera shoots, the real interviews). The phase shows as a badge on the project tile and in the project header so you can tell them apart at a glance. You can change a project's phase at any time from Edit.

Assign interviews to a project from the sidebar menu or from the project detail page. Each project tracks its own interviews, generates cross-interview reports, and provides prep briefs for upcoming sessions.

When your discovery interviews are wrapped and you're ready for the on-camera shoots, click "Move to Production" on the pre-production project. This forks the project into a new Production project, leaving the pre-prod version intact as your archive.

The fork carries forward your deduplicated list of interviewees as empty interview shells (one per person) and uses your latest project report to AI-draft an updated production goal and success criteria. You review and edit the draft before confirming, and you choose which people to carry forward via checkboxes.

Each forked interview shell remembers its source interviews from pre-production. When you click "Prep" on the shell later, the AI pulls in what was already captured with that person in pre-prod, so it knows what's been covered and what to push deeper on this time.

The new Production project shows a "Forked from: [original project]" link in its header so you can hop back to the source anytime. Deleting the source project doesn't affect the production version (the link just goes away).

From a project's detail page, click "Generate Report" to get an AI-generated cross-interview analysis. The report identifies themes, patterns, and insights across all interviews in the project.

Reports are saved with timestamps so you can track how your project evolves over time. View previous report versions or export any report as Markdown.

Import transcripts from Zoom, podcast platforms, or other tools into any project. Click "Add External Transcript" from the project detail page, paste or upload your transcript text, and it becomes a full interview in your project, available for analysis, reports, and coaching metrics.

Once you've completed and analyzed at least 2 interviews, the Insights section appears on your dashboard. It shows trend cards tracking your coaching metrics over time, plus your overall coaching score.

The insights dashboard requires analyzed interviews. Make sure to run the post-interview analysis after each recording to build your data.

StorySeeker tracks 6 interviewing skills across every analyzed interview: Question Quality, Follow-Up Depth, Tension & Stakes, Evidence, Active Listening, and Emotional Depth.

Each trend card shows a mini line chart of your scores over time. Click any skill to learn what it measures, why it matters, and see examples of good vs. poor performance. Use these metrics to identify which areas to focus on in future interviews.

Generate a Progress Report from the Insights section to get a comprehensive AI analysis of your interviewing journey across all analyzed interviews. Reports highlight improvement trends, persistent patterns, and specific recommendations.

Progress reports are usage-capped by plan: Free plans get 0, Starter gets 2/month, Pro gets 10/month, and Studio gets unlimited. View your saved report history with timestamps on the dashboard.

Visit the Account page to choose your preferred AI model for coaching and analysis. StorySeeker supports ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Claude (Anthropic), with the available models depending on your plan.

Pro and Studio plans include auto model failover. If your primary model is unavailable, StorySeeker automatically switches to the secondary model so your recording isn't interrupted.

Switch between dark mode and light mode from the Account page or the sidebar menu. You can also choose "System" to automatically match your operating system's theme preference. Your choice persists across sessions.

StorySeeker offers five plans: Free (3 hours lifetime trial), Family Project pass ($69 CAD one-time, 20 hours over 12 months, Oral History only), Starter (5 hours/month), Pro (10 hours/month), and Studio (15 hours/month). Higher tiers unlock Projects with prep briefs and reports, interview scheduling, virtual meeting integration, model failover, health dashboard, and increased progress report limits. The Family Project pass is designed for one-off family history projects and can be topped up with 5h, 10h, or 20h bundles.

Check your current plan and usage on the Account page. Visit the Pricing page to compare plans and upgrade.

When you delete an interview, it's soft-deleted (moved to a recovery area rather than permanently removed). Visit the Account page to find your recently deleted interviews and restore any that were removed by mistake.