Michelle - Intro: This podcast is for city communications teams and video professionals in government. We talk about expanding service delivery with video and streaming, media accessibility, gear, broadcast and streaming workflows and more. It's all right here on the Government Video Podcast. Episode Sponsor: The Government Video Podcast is brought to you by MediaScribe from Tightrope Media Systems. Tightrope believes accessibility should never be an afterthought. It should be built in from the start. MediaScribe's award-winning captioning and audio descriptions is your end-to-end solution for accessible government video. Visit mediascribe.ai to start your free trial today. Dana: Hey, folks, welcome to the Government Video Podcast. My name is Dana Healy, and I'm joined with Michelle: I'm Michelle Alimoradi. We're often hosting separately, but it's exciting to be back together on the pod today Dana: Yeah, and I'm really excited for today's topic, Michelle. Can you tell us a little bit about what we're diving into? Michelle: Sure. Yeah. So we talk a lot on this podcast about digital accessibility, particularly for video, and we've often talked about how there's like this curb cut effect, right? Where when you are trying to solve one accessibility problem, you often end up unlocking a lot of other benefits for a lot of other people. And so today is one of those topics, which is AI transcription, right? So a lot of these automated accessibility tools are giving you just tons and tons of transcription, which you can turn around and leverage in so many valuable ways beyond this initial purpose of accessibility compliance. Dana: A, a transcript, it's searchable, it's a reusable content asset. You can, really understand the information that is coming from your government out to the public, because a lot of times this is stuff that you all already said, and now it's documented. So yeah, let's dive into a little bit about ju- just general transcripts. So Michelle, where do most of our transcripts come from? Where, where government's transcripts are, are derived from? Michelle: Well, you can get them in one of two ways. So primarily today we're talking about these very long government meetings, right? So city council or a lot of commission meetings, which can be hours and hours of really valuable data. And so some folks are capturing those transcripts live. If they're doing some kind of live captioning during the meeting, you'll often get a transcript that you can download in various formats from that. Or if you're doing any sort of file-based accessibility where you're taking that meeting file after the fact and running it through some sort of solution that gives you the transcript after the fact, and you can also be getting other things like visual descriptions through a process like that after the fact. So something that you might use for audio description or image description that you're putting on your website somewhere. So Dana: That's really important to know is that folks, if you are doing captioning, then you have a transcript. So this is a piece that a lot of are like, "Well, what do I need? Do I need a different tool to make sure that I'm getting my transcripts?" It's already, built into your captioning piece, and it, provides an immense amount of value. and we're just gonna talk a little bit about what that value piece is. So one thing, Michelle, we were talking about was discoverability, right? Michelle: Right Dana: So full text search around these meetings, it also-- I mean, not that government is looking to, to really boost their SEO, but it does. You know, if somebody is looking at your city and, I wanna know about, you know, if the city of Hudson has fabulous parks, you can do a search and it's going to pull results from these types of transcripts because they are available publicly. does that provide a little color, Michelle? Michelle: For sure. And, the thing is, you can use these transcripts either just straight on the website, or you can also use them for searchability on the website, right? So some people will actually just paste the whole transcript on a page and have that available. And for folks maybe using screen readers or having, you know, other alternative ways that they want to take in that content, that's a really great thing to do. But there's also other ways that you can incorporate that into whatever search function you have on your website. So there's a lot of people taking advantage of context search these days. So, like that really fuzzy AI-enabled search that-- So say somebody wanted to know about the discussion about bike lanes, right? And they didn't know, like the agenda item or the date or the specific name of, you know, the, the rule that was being discussed. They can just put in like bikes or bicycles, and now anything from any of these transcripts can come out. And you can, you can structure that data too, to show people like, "Oh, here's the date," all the dates that are coming with these mentions of bikes along with it. So there's a lot that can be plugged in to searchability in that way. I think another great way to think about this on your website is, SEO as well, right? So you can take a look after-- Say you've just implemented these transcripts. Now you can take a look at maybe six months or a year out and see if your queries have changed, right? Like have, have the queries suddenly changed for what's bringing people to your site versus what you thought was the most popular content now that you've enabled every single part of these conversations to be searchable and, and see if that tells you anything. So I think it's, it's really cool as people are going through this process of implementing these new tools over, you know, maybe you started a year ago, maybe you're just starting now, and maybe that implementation process isn't gonna be finished for the next year or so. But now you have all these windows to see, you know, really what the ROI is of adding this, this searchability to your site. Dana: I think the other piece too is the, the search function is highly personal, right? Like, we all search things in a different way. You know, you may, like you used bike lanes as an example. Could be bike, it, it could be, well, the bipeds we're talking about it, so I'm gonna search bipeds. You know, things like that. So it provides a more friendly user experience, and since that is-- Government is in the service business. We're, we're here to be able to serve the public. What better way than making your website a faster to get information? And transcripts, like, holds people's hands and takes them to exactly what they need. Michelle: Right. And then, then there's the power of this internally as well, which I think is really great. So if you're in a communications department, public information officer, somebody trying to figure out what is the most useful, educational content we can put out there, or what programs really need a lot more, promotion or clarification, you can start taking these large bodies of data, these transcripts, and extracting trends from them internally, right? So a lot of cities are starting to use some sort of AI tools internally, whether that's, Copilot or Gemini, I think are pretty common ones that folks are using these days. So think about, like, I wanna know, what, what were the most popular themes coming up during public comment in city council meetings for the last year, right? And then think about how powerful data like that can be. And Dana, I don't know if you're like me. I'm the kind of person who like, that timeline of like how, how long ago something passed is super important. Like if I'm, if I'm planning to do some follow-up on something I learned from a recent meeting, I kind of feel that pressure of like, I need to do something with that right now before I forget, 'cause like here are all those high-level points I cared about. But now when you're transcribing everything, you can like kinda loosen that up, right? If I just wanna do these reports quarterly, I don't have to remember all that context. Like I just put that into my prompt and it'll pull that at any point. So it kinda gives you that flexibility of timeline to do this work too. Like now you're kind of more in control of, of your planning and, and also your, your research time. Dana: Right. So we're, like we're seeing we're able to cut down on staff time, like so you're not like chasing things around. You can work optimally because now I have the body of information, I will, you know, do whatever I need to do with that transcript at a, a later time 'cause it's available. Also it's, it's great to do sentiment analysis, right? To understand what people are saying about your city, about your government, and to get all of those, like you said, trends and understand that. Hey, if you're enjoying this podcast, you might also like our webinars. We host live sessions where we dig deeper into topics that matter to media makers and government, like accessibility, compliance, automation, all of it. Join us live to ask questions or browse our on demand library whenever it fits your schedule, click in the link in the show notes to check out what's available. Dana: What about records requests? Does this-- would this cut down on that at all, Michelle, having transcripts available on your website? Michelle: I think that is going to be one of the bigger benefits as well, right? So people are searching about bike lanes on the, on the public side. Think about it, like internally, you can be doing that as well, right? So somebody makes a request and maybe the clari-- like the clarity of their request isn't super great either, right? Like they don't, they don't have all the context they need to really understand when the thing happened. now you have all this context to be able to find anything, that is related to that request faster and clarify that and deliver that a lot faster. So yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it as well. And related to that, content reuse, right? If you're, if you're in the information office, comms department, social media manager, you now have this really powerful tool for content reuse, for finding quotes, for finding, you know, all the necessary contextual conversation around a recent zoning change, anything that you need to communicate. And those kinds of things can fuel a press release, right? You could easily do your first draft press release from something like that. You can easily come up with your social media posts for the week based on some sort of extraction prompt, right? Like, tell me about what, what educational gaps did we see in the public comment for the last six months, you know? And you can even automate those things. You could have it show up like every Monday, tell me what I should be posting on social media this week, right? And then you can go back. Obviously, these are all human-in-the-loop workflows too. They're all friendly for like, you know, tell me when this happened so I can go back and review it because you still have that full transcript. You don't have to just rely on AI to like give you that, that little piece. You can actually have it take you to the spot where you can review all the context and, and make sure it got it right. So I, I really like it for that, as a person who's generating a lot of public-facing con, content. Anytime you can find a time savings with that, both for, for the topics themselves, and for the creation. And this just really gives you that like social proof, right? That the things that you're focused on are, are where the actual needs are. Dana: Yeah. And then, I mean, like you said, that workflow builds itself. We go live with our government video, our government meeting, we caption it, we transcribe it. You're taking that, you're doing your analysis, you're developing that content, calendar and pushing all of it out. That's beautiful. I love that. Great idea Michelle: Yeah. And I think one of the biggest things at the end of the day that really these all fit under this umbrella is, is your return on investment, right? So there is obviously a compliance concern with putting all of these things in place. But then when we talk about how we had to, you know, budget for these things, and we had to show, what, what really was the value of all of this-- of these changes that we made. When you start to build these automated workflows around this data that you suddenly have so ready access to, you can really streamline that type of reporting or even automate that type of reporting, which is really great. Dana: Yeah. That's great Michelle: Yeah. That I hope is inspiring to some folks that are out there evaluating tools right now and also thinking about buy-in, right? Because I think one of the biggest places where we hear, people get excited about automated transcripts is city clerks, right? City clerks get super excited about this, and they may not be the person that was originally, in charge of figuring out, you know, how video accessibility or digital accessibility was going to happen. But now you have this other person on your side that's like, "Oh my gosh, yeah, think of the possibilities here. Think about how much time it could be saving." and we didn't even get into-- We should do a whole other episode on this, but we didn't even get into like translations, but a component of this. Dana: Yep Michelle: Stay tuned for the next episode on translations. But yeah, it's just, it's-- The possibilities are really endless, and we have really only scratched the surface of ways that you could be using this information. Dana: Awesome. Well, thanks Michelle. Like hopefully people will take this and they can start building their own workflows around the transcripts, because a lot of folks, they already have it and maybe they're underutilizing it. So, hopefully this helps Michelle: Thanks everyone for joining us on this episode of Government Video Podcast, and be sure to check out other episodes we have on digital accessibility. We also have a wealth of webinars on our website on video accessibility and digital accessibility at mediascribe.ai/webinars. Thanks everyone. We'll see you next time.
