AboutSummaries of Vermont Legislative and Floor Sessions Added to GoldenDomeVT.com
All 2,600 meetings from 2025 session now available as both summaries and SmartTranscripts
Since January an increasing number of reporters, advocates, bloggers and interested citizens have been visiting https://goldendomevt.com for SmartTranscripts of the 2,600 committee and floor meetings of the Vermont legislature which have occurred so far this year. SmartTranscripts combine the searchability and skimmability of text with the depth of video and audio.
However, with more than 50 new meetings posted each legislative day, even skimming through transcripts can take too long – especially for those who want to engage with committees in time to influence legislation. By the time a bill leaves committee, the range of possible solutions to the issue it addresses has usually been drastically narrowed.
Smarter Search, Faster Insights
The most requested features from GoldenDomeVT users were:
- Concise summaries of each meeting.
- A way to search the entire archive of SmartTranscripts, now housing 2,600 (and counting) documents.
Now, both SmartSearch and AI-generated summaries are available on the site. GoldenDomeVT is free, non-commercial, and non-partisan—it does not require registration or collect personal data.
In just a few days since launching the summaries, site traffic from Vermont has increased by nearly 25%.
User comments on summaries:
“This is so helpful! Thanks for doing this.”
”Woot woot!!!!!!”
“How great, thank you for letting me know.”
“What an Elegant and fine feature. Thank you so much. “
“This is super helpful! I’ll take it for a spin. A year from now we’ll wonder how we got along without a tool like this.”
“FANNNNTASTIC!!!! Thank you, Tom!”
“Wow! This is incredible and I bet there is a great deal of positive feedback.”
An abundance of information
Since Covid, all Vermont legislative meetings have been available as YouTube videos. These recordings are valuable for reviewing what actually happened and why. However, finding the right meeting or learning in time that something significant has happened to a bill has been nearly impossible.
I initially developed SmartTranscripts to help our Vermont’s very small press corps better cover the all-important committee meetings. But the user base has grown far beyond the formal press corps, and users told me that even having textual transcripts to skim and search individually didn’t let them find what they needed quickly enough.
So, with the able assistance of ChatGPT, which did most of the new coding, I added SmartSearch and summaries to make the growing collection of data more accessible.
Results:
- Summaries are now more popular than full SmartTranscripts.
- Summaries often get more views than the official YouTube recordings they’re based on.
- Total hits on SmartTranscripts have also increased—people can now quickly find the meetings they need to examine in detail.
But what about hallucination?
Both SmartTranscripts and the summaries are generated by AI. Neither are checked by humans. SmartTranscripts are only slightly more accurate than closed captioning and speaker identification is sometimes incorrect. However since SmartTranscripts link directly to clips in the official video, anything important can and should be checked. Hallucination, the tendency of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to make stuff up, is not a significant problem with summaries so long as the LLM is instructed properly to make the summary only from the data in the transcript and not from what it thinks it knows about the world beyond.
See also:
2/26/2025 Beyond the Web: Tom Evslin (a talk I gave at Indiana State University on GoldenDomeVT and the technology behind it)
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