Using artificial intelligence tools to listen in on public meetings is a growing trend across the country. Journalists in Maine and Michigan have used AI to summarize school board meetings and find story leads.
A local think tank is now trying out a tool in Hawaiʻi that it hopes will increase transparency.
Joe Kent is the executive vice president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaiʻi. He created the Open Hearings tool after he felt he was wasting time and money hiring interns to monitor meetings.
The tool tracks 26 government bodies in Hawaiʻi, from county councils to neighborhood boards. Kent spoke with The Conversation about the new tool.
“I remember sitting in a long government hearing on Maui, and they passed a tax hike. It was like at midnight, and I was like, ‘There's got to be some better way to do this,’” Kent said. “So we hired some programmers and made this tool that plugs in and listens to government hearings and automatically transcribes them and summarizes them so we can know what happened quickly.”
“It emails us too every morning, says, ‘Here's what happened yesterday in the government hearings.’ Now, of course, I know it was written by AI, so I can click on the hearing and check it to see what was real, and it also allows me to chat with it as well. I can ask at what time code did the major vote occur, or was there anything embarrassing that happened in this hearing, or what did testifiers think of the proposal? It's just been a really neat and unique way for me to know what's going on.”
Kent told HPR that the tool is not tailored specifically for Hawaiʻi, though he has been able to steer it to understand common Hawaiian words and specific lawmakers' names.
“We basically wanted to try it out as an experiment to see what happens,” he said. “If nobody wants to use it, if there are problems, then we're happy to just pull back and close the door. So it's a door we can walk through and walk back out of and shut down if we need to. But basically, we'd like to get data on whether this is interesting or it's going to lead somewhere, and whether it actually does produce some good.”
Learn more about Open Hearings here.
This story aired on The Conversation on Nov. 18, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this interview for the web.
