Truth Teller – Fact Check in Real Time Speeches
February 28, 2013

Truth Teller – Fact Check in Real Time Speeches
http://truthteller.washingtonpost.com/
Truth Teller is a news application built by the Washington Post with funding from a Knight News Prototype grant. The goal of Truth Teller is to fact check speeches in as close to real time as possible. The three-month prototype built by the Post is an enormous step in that direction. The genesis of Truth Teller was fairly well captured in this Poynter piece, which came out around the time the funding was announced. (One note: the politician mentioned was Michele Bachmann — a she, not a he.) The Truth Teller prototype was built and runs with a combination of several technologies — some new, some very familiar. They have combined video and audio extraction with a speech-to-text technology to search a database of facts and fact checks. They are effectively taking in video, converting the audio to text (the rough transcript below the video), matching that text to their database, and then displaying, in real time, what’s true and what’s false. This has been added to the tools section of Research Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog. This has been added to Business Intelligence Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.