Tokushima and e-books firm Media Do to tap AI in experiment to summarize governor's briefings

TOKUSHIMA – The Tokushima Prefectural Government and e-books distributor Media Do Holdings Co. announced Tuesday they will launch an experiment to use AI to summarize the governor's news conferences in a bid to make more administrative documents available online more quickly. Under the experiment, which they plan to start Monday, they will use a speech recognition system to catch remarks at news conferences given by the governor, and the complete transcription will be posted on the prefectural government's website after being checked by prefecture officials. Users can choose the amount of words they want to read from 10 percent to 90 percent, and AI summarizes the documents in accordance with the users' requests. The new system will reduce the time needed to transcribe news conferences from roughly 10 hours to two hours, and will enable the prefecture to post documents about four hours after the news conferences are held, according to the officials. "Government agencies create a lot of documents but most of them are difficult to read. I hope summarized documents will help people familiarize themselves with the government," said Tokushima Gov. Kamon Iizumi, adding that the move will also help reduce prefectural officials' working hours.