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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Media The Washington Post Has Developed a Real-Time Lie Detector for Speeches

Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 12:25 PM

People were begging for this kind of thing during the 2012 presidential campaign, but it looks like technology was about a year too late. Still, this is really cool:

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 Truth Teller prototype was built and runs with a combination of several technologies — some new, some very familiar. We’ve combined video and audio extraction with a speech-to-text technology to search a database of facts and fact checks. 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.

You can see TruthTeller in action over here. It's not much to look at yet, but I have high hopes for this thing by the time 2016 rolls around.

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Comments (12) RSS

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Did they calibrate it by watching Fox News? That's the easiest method.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on January 29, 2013 at 12:32 PM

In other news, the Washington Post's main offices caught fire this afternoon when they attempted to fact check a Paul Ryan speech.

Posted by delirian on January 29, 2013 at 12:33 PM

There's just one small problem: At no time is a politician ever not lying.

Posted by Fifty-Two-Eighty

on January 29, 2013 at 12:37 PM

It goes off everytime a politician opens his mouth. Heyo!

Posted by Rotten666 on January 29, 2013 at 12:53 PM

Wanna bet it will stop working when education reform or for-profit colleges are the subjects under discussion?

(Joke explainer: The WP company makes ALL its profit from Kaplan, not from the newspaper.)

Posted by ScrawnyKayaker on January 29, 2013 at 12:55 PM

Who will truth the truth-teller?

Posted by podcaf on January 29, 2013 at 1:02 PM

This is the major next step towards robots simply writing the news for us.

Posted by treacle on January 29, 2013 at 1:02 PM

@3: And lie detectors work less usefully on sociopaths (which are prevalent in politics.)

Posted by i'm sure it'll be used mostly for obama and ignore the rest on January 29, 2013 at 1:06 PM

Comedy Central did this back in the early 1990s when they would cover State of the Union speeches. They would have subtitles showing the reality compared to the rhetoric.

Overall it's a good idea, but the Washington Post lacks credibility and is ultimately part of the corporate "establishment" media.

Posted by CC-Rob on January 29, 2013 at 1:22 PM

They should run the last 4 years of SLOG posts through this thing...better put on earmuffs when the buzzer starts going!

Posted by Supreme Ruler Of The Universe

on January 29, 2013 at 2:08 PM

Someone needs to make an actual lie-detecting sort of video analysis device that takes visual cues that are shown to indicate a person's willful lying, such as eye movement and infrared measurement of nose temperature. Facts can be deftly interpreted by a skilled politician to make a fact-checking database arguable, but some reading of a person that actually measures his/her intention to mislead... that'd be interesting.

Posted by Michael of the Green on January 29, 2013 at 2:55 PM

Ultimately this will just result in politicians saying less than they already do. Contrary to @3, people in politics don't lie much more than us regular folks do, though when they do, they do it with a whole lot more conviction. The whole art of politics is about saying as little as possible for as long as possible. Think about how hard it was for you to get McKenna to admit to just about any policy position. Think about how little Romney committed to outside of the debates. With each election's debates getting less and less worthwhile, it wouldn't be surprising to see this technology completely obsolete in 2020, when even a question about what specific actions the candidate would take to prevent Florida from being submerged by rising ocean levels will produce only a 9 minute long story about how delicious his grandmother's fresh squeezed orange juice was.

Posted by Christampa on January 29, 2013 at 9:16 PM