Ninth-Floor

Portfolio Case Studies

The Truth Booth (AI)

With The Truth Booth, Civic Media was able to connect with local attendees at county fairs in three of Wisconsin’s rural counties where the network has radio stations. Participants were invited to “step into the booth” and tell us a story that we recorded and later made available on the network’s website. This type of connection resulted in participants opening up about what makes life special for them in their particular corner of the state.

The response was so great that it resulted in a heavy backlog of interviews with publishing delayed due to the challenge presented by transcribing each interview. I ideated a solution that made use of OpenAI’s Whisper for transcribing each interview, and then using ChatGPT to suggest a summary of the interview. The transcribed content was so accurate that we were able to cut down the time it took to go from recording the interview to publishing it from around 3 hours to about 20 minutes for the average interview. We then built a process in which the interviewee got a link to their recording automatically via text and email once it was uploaded.

Link to Interviews: TheTruth Booth

Contributions:

Leadership

My role as VP enabled me to take the initiative with this idea and get the resources needed to turn it into a product we could use internally. There was some apprehension among some of the internal media talent about using AI in general, so I spearheaded the organization's AI Working Group that ultimately drafted the networks AI Working Policy.

Strategy

Capturing a special moment for fairgoers and providing them with a memory they could revisit afterwards proved a great way to create long standing relationships with them over time.

Innovation

Using AI tools for summarization was a novel concept in this organization, and being able to show how productivity could be improved helped bring some initially reticent people along to embracing this new technology.

Value

The ultimate value of this project proved to be manifold: it helped us increase productivity, since the tool is now available for all shows the network records; it helped introduce this new technology to the organization; and it led to participants in the booth to get the links to their recordings much faster.