Since the end of last year, STAAR, the Assembly of the Republic’s Automatic Transcription System, began to be implemented. It completely transformed the work of those who transcribed word for word everything that was said in the chamber, they went from transcribers to editors.
The role of employees is so much more important, because in addition to correcting what the machine doesn’t understand, they add everything that is not necessarily part of the recordings and is important for the complete picture of each session.
The Artificial Intelligence technology used in transcriptions is from Open AI – the company behind the famous ChatGPT -, but the programs run on the Assembly’s own servers.
Everything else that contributed, from the automatic indexing of the audio to the dictionary with very specific terms from parliamentary slang, was the work of Pedro Nascimento’s thesis. He completed a master’s thesis on “Digital Technologies for Business” at ISCTE Executive Education. Instead of just describing theoretically his ideas for the functioning of the system, and with the help of ISCTE and the Assembly itself as well as employees, he created in practice the system that today works every day to remember the debates that form our democracy.
