The San Francisco Bay Area is home to nine counties, more than 100 municipalities and a complex array of regional agencies, special districts, utilities, associations and commissions. Even on the best days, it’s impossible for the San Francisco Chronicle‘s team of reporters to cover every San Francisco news event, let alone the scores of public meetings that happen across the region.
To meet this challenge, we have worked with the team of editorial engineers, AI developers and designers we call the Hearst DevHub to implement into our reporting workflows an AI tool that monitors and summarizes public meetings. The tool automates the transcription, keyword detection and summarization of city council, school board, state legislature and other public meetings. It empowers our journalists to efficiently monitor and report on events in their communities without being physically present or listening to the entirety of each meeting. Reporters then go deeper, making calls, checking facts and talking to sources, leading to stories and scoops they otherwise might not have had.
The tool is built on a robust technical foundation. More than 200 custom web scrapers watch government platforms hourly for new meetings. When a new meeting is detected, the recording is downloaded, the audio extracted, and the content transcribed using a self-hosted transcription system built by the Hearst DevHub and powered by OpenAI’s largest open source Whisper model.
Reporters receive email alerts when a predefined keyword is detected in the transcript, and Slack messages provide a space for generating summaries or querying transcripts directly using OpenAI’s GPT-4o model. Beyond summaries, the tool also enables reporters to have a conversation with a meeting transcript, much like interacting with ChatGPT. This lets them ask questions — such as what a council member said about a specific topic or whether a particular issue was discussed — and receive instant, contextual responses grounded in the transcript itself.
Using this tool, we have reported dozens of stories that we otherwise may not have found or which would have taken us much longer to find, including San Francisco’s embrace of “entertainment zones”; delays at hospitals that kept patients waiting in ambulances and cost taxpayers thousands; the shuttering of a job training nonprofit; an apple cannery’s departure — the latest sign of tumult in Sonoma County agriculture; and more.
