Czech Parliament Starts Using AI To Transcribe Sessions

The Chamber of Deputies has started using artificial intelligence (AI) to take written records of its sessions, in the first use of AI in the lower house of Czech parliament, the Chamber of Deputies Office said in a press release yesterday.

In addition to converting speech to text, AI can recognize individual speakers and facilitate subsequent searches.

“We record almost verbatim all the speeches on the floor of the house. We have records from 1848, when the constituent Austrian Reichstag met, to the present day,” said Pavel Dibelka, head of the lower house department of stenographic services. He said the methods used range “from graphic shorthand to the first tape recorders, mechanical typewriters, to computers and now automatic transcription by artificial intelligence.”

Chamber of Deputies Office head Martin Plisek said AI was helping to address a significant shortage of stenographers, as shorthand is no longer taught. “Moreover, there has been a marked increase in the volume of speeches being transcribed,” he noted.

After testing lasting for several months, it has been fully used in the lower house since September.

Ondrej Klimes, from Newton Technologies, said the recognition model for the lower house had been several years in the making and was trained directly on recordings of the sessions. “It was a matter of enriching the large speech recognition model with specific recordings and texts from the Chamber of Deputies, so that the system can then deal with specific expressions heard here,” he said.

Dibelka said the AI tool has clearly improved the recording service. He added that the main human work is no longer writing itself, but listening to and editing the machine-made text. Automated transcripts are used not only for plenary meetings of the house, but also for lower house committees and commissions.

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