Fact-checking app launched by Washington Post

The Washington Post has launched a real-time mobile and desktop app called Truth Teller which will allow anyone to cite, transcribe and show up errors in speeches, videos and documents. According to a story on Media Bistro, the app (which is in its nascent stages and is still working out the bugs) has the capacity to change the way people consumer their political media. The app was funded in part by a prototye grant from the Knight News Challenge. 

"The best example of the way that Truth Teller presents facts seamlessly is through its prototype of Speaker of the House John Boehner’s post-election speech on taxes. The Truth Teller system not only points out statistical references within Boehner’s speech for fact-checking, but also finds concepts buried deep in context and checks those as well. And all of the pieces of the system, from transcription to location and confirmation, work together seamlessly to show facts right as the user sees them. 

“What you see in the prototype is actual live fact checking — each time the video is played the fact checking starts anew,” writes Washington Post Executive Director for Digital News Cory Haik in the app’s About page."

The Post says it has combined video and audio extraction with speech to text technology to search databases. 

"We are effectively taking in video, converting the audio to text (the rough transcript below the video), matching that text to our database, and then displaying, in real time, what’s true and what’s false."