Cortico’s Local Voices Network (LVN) platform enables partner organizations to understand their communities’ lived experiences, amplify typically underheard voices, inform public understanding, and drive better policy and decisions.
LVN is a unique “human listening + machine learning” system that combines the ancient techniques of human dialogue and deep listening (through facilitated small-group conversations) with the analytic power of modern AI (through tools for identifying patterns/themes across conversations).
The result is a system that captures, at scale, public sentiment with a level of authenticity and nuance that surveys and focus groups cannot match.
Partners host small-group, facilitated conversations on Zoom or in person (around our Digital Hearth) that are recorded, uploaded, and transcribed on the platform. Conversations are driven by personal experiences that participants share, and the data is owned by the partners. Sharing of audio highlights from one conversation into another enables the surfacing of diverse viewpoints and experiences.
Developed in collaboration with MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication, AI-powered listening and analytic tools help users see patterns across conversations, identify themes, and highlight voices around what matters most in the community. The platform supports management of conversation archives, speech content analysis and visualization, and online/social posting of audio highlights.
To surface these insights and voices into public dialogue and decision making, partners can easily share and publish excerpts using visualizations, public share links, downloadable audio, or iframe embed. With customizable privacy settings, conversations can be made public, opening up participant voices to community leaders, policymakers, members of the media, or other communities.
With a recommended 4-6 people per conversation, our sessions are a welcome change from crowded town halls or open meetings where underheard voices get drowned out.
By guiding participants to share their stories, LVN conversations capture the kind of insights that shape our everyday lives and that can’t be gleaned from surveys and focus groups.
Community members are invited to take the lead in an LVN conversation, responding to questions from a facilitator who is there to provide a comfortable space.
People in communities everywhere are tired of speaking up and not feeling heard. Recording small group conversations is a way to honor the individuals who share and make a commitment to elevate their voices for broader impact beyond the moment of a conversation itself. Through recording, LVN makes it possible for personal experiences to effect direct change by informing leadership selection, strategic direction, and policy change.
We offer partners experience-tested advice and resources in recording conversations and collecting simple verbal consent from participants who feel informed, energized, and prepared to be recorded.
You can use any platform or tool you wish to record your conversations, as LVN is compatible with any video meeting platform or device that creates an audio file.
Our partners own their data and fully control who can access it and what is done with it.
Listen to a highlight medley from participants reflecting on their LVN experience.
Audio recordings of conversations are transcribed with each word in the transcript assigned to its speaker. We use a combination of state-of-art automated transcription and high-quality human transcription.
Conversation content may be accessed via search or through discovery aided by automated topic analysis. We intentionally use transparent, explainable models to address concerns of machine learning bias.
Data visualization, selection and tagging features enable powerful content analysis.
Cortico and MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication work together to develop and integrate advanced research and prototypes (e.g., conversation analytics and data trust architecture) into the LVN platform.
Our prototype Digital Hearth is a custom audio hardware device for high-quality audio capture/playback seamlessly integrated into LVN.
We are developing advanced natural language processing algorithms to analyze discourse dynamics and conversation quality.
We are working with partners to co-design and pilot a privacy-preserving data trust architecture to serve the needs of highly sensitive topics where trust is paramount.
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