Full Fact talks automated factchecking on BBC Click

Last week, Spencer Kelly and the BBC Click team visited the Full Fact office to film a report on our automated factchecking tools, Live and Trends.

Our automated factchecking factchecking project is designed to help factcheckers and journalists keep up with the pace of misinformation. It does this by monitoring live subtitles and matching them against existing factchecks in our archive.

Our Digital Product Manager Mevan Babakar demonstrated a proof-of-concept version of our speech-to-text automated function.

As Mevan says:

The tool I’m most excited about is speech-to-text factchecking. When someone is talking live it takes you in real-time to their primary sources.

So if a journalist is in a press conference, or if they’re interviewing someone, they can see straight away if there’s something the person in front of them has said that’s accurate.

There’s no debate that can really happen without eventually hitting on numbers. And at the point where you hit numbers, it’s important that they’re correct and not being manipulated. I think that’s the place that we’re starting from and the world we want to create.

The BBC Click report shows Live and Trends in action and explores how they could work one day in a real-time factcheck of Prime Minister's Questions. Check it out below: