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For Suno India, a podcast and audio journalism platform with just six full-time employees, efficient collaboration is critical. Based in Delhi and Hyderabad, the outlet works with a distributed network of freelance reporters that allows Suno India to cover underreported stories and underserved communities.

To ease collaboration with reporters and to quickly publish podcasts, the newsroom takes maximum advantage of Pinpoint, Google’s AI-powered transcription and research tool.

“When we started Suno India, there was no way of transcribing audio, so we had to listen to the audio and type everything out” says Rakesh Kamal, Suno India’s COO and one of three co-founders. “With Pinpoint, when we upload the audio, you get the transcription in minutes, and it’s very accurate.”

Pinpoint also helps Kamal’s editors stay connected with reporters out in the field, especially when they’re in areas with poor connectivity.

“The reporter [Greeshma Kuthar] didn’t have continuous internet,” Kamal says. “She had maybe 30 to 45 minutes at a time.” Kuthar used her uptime to share audio. Then Kamal and his team used Pinpoint to quickly create a transcript. With that text document, editors could collaborate with Kuthar offline, making editorial decisions and keeping the production moving.

“We could discuss [the story], we could talk on the phone and by SMS, we could get to the narration immediately,” Kamal says. “In a time-constrained setting, Pinpoint really helped us.”

Pinpoint helps journalists transcribe interviews and explore and analyze data from large collections of documents. In addition to using Pinpoint’s transcription feature, the newsroom uses it to store past interviews and collections of text documents that can be tagged, cataloged, sorted and searched, all within the platform.

Suno India’s small team produces 25 podcasts and 1 newsletter per month, focused on everything from deep dives into climate, health care, politics and other complex issues, as well as locally focused topics like Hyderabad’s multicultural heritage. The ability to quickly search for connections and consistencies between previously published stories and those in production is a huge help, Kamal says.

“Those comparisons become very easy. You can tag [your transcripts], and it becomes really easy for you to cross reference them,” says Kamal.

While Kamal values Suno India’s independence, he acknowledges that “as a small organization, you have certain limits.” Leveraging Pinpoint’s platform to reduce production time — going back and forth between editors to decide on where to cut, where to add music — helps maximize the time they can spend reporting more stories. A process that could’ve taken four or five days, Kamal says, can be done in a day.

“With small teams, the challenge is that you don't have enough time to report,” says Kamal. “Technology only helps in making sure that we are able to do a lot more as a small team.”