Understanding the fact that the accuracy of news has been impacted by fake news and often ends up unverified on media platforms like radio, which is the most widely used communication medium in Africa.
Richard Zulu; Founder of Outbox Hub Uganda, on behalf of the Hub seek to develop a tool dubbed “Verifywise”; a project under Outbox research, an initiative of Outbox Uganda – which seeks to build an assisted fact-checking tool on radio by matching claims made over radio with facts already verified and documented using statistical analysis and Artificial Intelligence (A.I).
The tool (Verifywise) will have a radio monitoring feature built with Raspberry Pi and antennas which will collect statistical facts from various reports, already fact-checked documents, and any other open data databases or repositories.
“Our focus will be on the most listened to political radio shows in English in Uganda. Data collected will be stored on the Google cloud platform,” Richard stated.
Speech recognition technology will be used to identify claims made on radio, and will be compared to the already established collection of statistical information using statistical analysis. If a match is found, a verdict will then be shared with the radio presenter together with an audio clip of the fact checked claim.
