Cortico is a non-profit that builds audio tools to improve public dialogue. Allison King is an engineer at Cortico, and she joins the show to talk about the process of building audio applications. 

One of these applications was a system for ingesting radio streams, transcribing the radio, and looking for duplicate information across the different radio stations. In a talk at Data Council, Allison talked through the data engineering architecture for processing these radio streams, and the patterns that she found across the radio streams, including clusters of political leanings.

Another project from Cortico is called Local Voices Network. The Local Voices Network is built around a piece of hardware called a “digital hearth”, a specialized device that records discussions among people in a community. These community discussions are made available to journalists, public officials, and political candidates, creating a listening channel that connects these communities and stakeholders. Much of our conversation is focused on the engineering of the digital hearth, this device that sits in the center of community discussions.