My new gig - SmartTrancripts of VT legislative committee meetings

GoldenDomeVT.com Website To Offer Free SmartTranscripts of 2025 Legislative Committee Meetings

Searchable SmartTranscripts Help Reporters and Citizens Track Actions in 25 Standing Committees

Stowe, VT – December 16, 2024

For the first time, reporters, state and local officials, bloggers, lobbyists, and others can access free, searchable SmartTranscripts of legislative committee meetings immediately after videos are posted. SmartTranscripts provide text extracted from committee meeting videos, linked directly to the relevant video clips.

Unlike video, SmartTranscripts enable keyword and speaker-specific searches and allow users to skim content quickly. By highlighting text in the transcript, users can instantly view and hear the corresponding video clip, which adds context through body language and facial expressions while assuring the accuracy of quotes.

Anne Galloway, founder of VTDigger, calls GoldenDomeVT.com “a great service to reporters and people who follow the legislature.”

“There are far fewer reporters covering the State House than there used to be,” said Tom Evslin, developer of GoldenDomeVT.com. “Yet the 2025 session will be crucial for Vermont’s future. Reporters have told me they often don’t know until after the fact which committee meetings will feature key testimony or amendments. GoldenDomeVT is a tool designed to make legislative proceedings accessible in time for informed citizens to have the opportunity to influence their legislators.”

The website  https://www.goldendomevt.com is currently in alpha mode with a selection of SmartTranscripts from the end of the 2024 legislative session. The plan is to add committee meetings from the upcoming 2025 session as soon as the videos are posted – usually just hours after the meetings end. Feedback including bug reports and suggestions for improvement can be sent to [email protected].

GoldenDomeVT.com is a free service requiring no registration, free of advertising, and does not request or collect personal information. The code used to create SmartTranscripts and the website will be released as shareware on GitHub, enabling others to build on the platform or adapt it for their local use.

Technical Details

The site is hosted on AWS (Amazon). Transcribing is done by the commercial service Deepgram using machine-learning technology. Speaker identification is done using OpenAI's ChatGPT. Videos clips are displayed with YouTube's viewer. The videos of the meetings are posted on YouTube by the legislature. They are linked to by SmartTranscripts but not copied or modified in any way.

About Tom Evslin

Tom Evslin is a retired high-tech entrepreneur,  former Board Member of both the Vermont Jornalism Trust (VTDigger) and Vermont Public as well as a former Vermont Secretary of Transportation and stimulus czar. He currently develops shareware to aid in local news reporting.

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