The purpose of GoldenDomeVT is to make meetings of the Vermont Legislature and its 26 standing committees more accessible and transparent - especially to reporters, local officials, bloggers, lobbyists, and others who have a vital interest in what the legislature does or doesn't do.
SmartTranscripts are computer-generated transcriptions of meetings which are accessible almost as soon as the videos are posted to YouTube. SmartTranscripts, unlike video, are searchable by keywords, phrases, or speakers so you can quickly find what's important to you in the meeting. The "smart" part of SmartTranscripts is that they are linked to the official videos of the meeting. Just select the text you're interested in and you'll instantly see and hear the clip of that part of the meeting. Emotion and body-language are also important for understanding what is actually happening; clips let you hear how something was said and how someone looked when they said it. You can often see the reaction of others to the speaker.
SmartTranscripts of committee meetings support direct email to committee members.
Like closed captioning, computer transcriptions contain inaccuracies although they are often more faithful to what was actually said than human transcriptions; but access to video clips lets you assure the accuracy of anything important.
Most of the work of the legislature is done by the 15 standing committees in the House and 11 in the Senate. Most of them meet once or more a day during the session. There are not nearly enough reporters to attend all those meetings and it's hard to tell in advance which will be important. Since Covid, the meetings have been on Zoom and the legislature posts videos shortly after the meeting on YouTube. But watching a video of a three-hour committee meeting to find a few crucial moments is time consuming and tedious. SmartTranscripts enable the few reporters covering the statehouse to "see" more of what's happening in the committee rooms.
During the 2025 legislative session, SmartTranscripts will be posted on GoldenDomeVT almost as soon as the videos appear on YouTube. Feedback is welcome through Contact Us
GoldenDomeVt and the SmartTranscripts are free and require no registration to use. They do not use cookies. They do not request personal information although the website follows the usual practice of gathering traffic data including the IP addresses it is accessed from and the browsers and devices used for access. The actual transcribing is done by a commercial service called Deepgram. Speaker identification is done using OpenAI's ChatGPT. Videos clips are displayed with YouTube's viewer, which follows its usual cookie practice. The videos of the meetings are posted on YouTube by the legislature. They are linked to by SmartTranscripts but not copied or modified in any way. All the code written specifically for this project is open source and public domain and will shortly be published on github.
This service is a shareware project by Tom Evslin of Stowe, Vermont. It is available free but with no warranty of any kind nor any commitment to keep the service available or fix bugs. SmartTranscripts do contain inaccuracies and speaker identification is still experimental. No use should be made of a quote without playing the associated clip to verify who said what and how they said it.