The Chamber of Deputies started using artificial intelligence to take text records of meetings. In addition to converting spoken speech to text, the tool can recognize individual speakers or facilitate subsequent searches. The parliamentary office informed about this in today’s press release. This is the first use of artificial intelligence in the lower house of parliament.
“We record almost verbatim all speeches in the plenary session of the House of Representatives. We have records from 1848, when the Constituent Assembly of the Austrian Reich was held, until today,” said Pavel Dibelka, head of the stenographic service department, and outlined the development of recording technology. “From graphic shorthand to the first tape recorders, mechanical typewriters, to computers and today automatic transcription using artificial intelligence,” he described.
According to Parliament Chancellor Martin Plíšek, artificial intelligence helps solve the significant shortage of stenographers when shorthand is no longer taught. “In addition, there was a significant increase in the volume of transcribed speeches,” he noted.
The artificial intelligence tool has been in full use by the Chamber since September after several months of testing. According to Ondřej Klimeš from Newton Technologies, the recognition model for the House of Representatives was prepared for several years and trained directly on recordings from meetings. “It was about enriching a large model of speech recognition with specific recordings and texts from the House of Representatives, so that the system can handle, for example, specific expressions that are heard right here during transcription,” said Klimeš.
According to Dibelka, the artificial intelligence tool has clearly improved the recording service from the experience so far. According to him, the main human work is no longer writing itself, but listening and editing the machine-generated text. According to him, text processing is faster, for example, thanks to the fact that the system can determine by itself where to write lowercase or uppercase letters or numbers. Automated transcripts are used not only in plenary, but also in parliamentary committees and commissions.
Source: www.tyden.cz
