Said in Committee [sic]
AR committee meetings. Exactly as spoken.
About Said in Committee
Said in Committee archives and indexes Arkansas General Assembly committee meetings, making them searchable by what was said, who said it, and what documents were discussed.
Every quote links to the second it was said, so you can cite it [sic]: exactly as spoken.
Sic is Latin for “thus.” Editors use it to say a quotation is reproduced exactly as the original has it, and the original need not contain an error (Merriam-Webster). That is all we mean by it: this is the record. We never use it to mark a speaker’s mistake, and most mistakes in a transcript are the transcription software’s anyway.
Where the data comes from
- Meeting calendar: arkleg.state.ar.us
- Video: the legislature’s SliQ video archive. The player here streams the legislature’s own video.
- Documents: agendas and exhibits posted to arkleg.state.ar.us, archived as posted.
- Bills: bill numbers are linked to a meeting when the agenda, a video chapter, or the transcript names them. Each link shows the words it was matched on.
How transcription works
No person types these transcripts. A meeting can have two, and the page lets you switch between them:
- SliQ live captions are the automatic captions embedded in the official video stream. They come out as the meeting happens, so they drop and garble words.
- Whisper transcripts are made afterwards from the archived audio by the Whisper speech-recognition model (large-v3-turbo), on our own hardware. They are usually more accurate, but they still mishear names, numbers and bill titles.
Every passage links to the second it was spoken. Check the video before you rely on the words.
How speakers are identified
- Who spoke when. Software splits the audio into turns by voice, without knowing anyone’s name. That gives “Speaker 1”, “Speaker 2” and so on; we hide those placeholders rather than show them as names.
- Whose voice it is. Each voice is compared against a library of voiceprints, recorded samples of people whose identity is known. A close match puts that name on the turn.
A match is a guess. Two voices can sound alike, and microphones change how a person sounds, so a named turn can name the wrong person.
What “verified” means
Verification applies to voiceprints, not to individual sentences.
- Verified means a person listened and confirmed that a voiceprint belongs to the person it names. Only verified voiceprints can name a speaker in a new meeting on their own.
- Unverified means no person has checked the name. Every speaker name in a transcript currently shows this label, because a name is still a machine match even when the voiceprint behind it is verified.
- A voiceprint a person rejects is never used to name anyone again.
Treat every speaker name as unconfirmed until you have watched that moment.
Privacy
This site sets no tracking cookies. Cloudflare Web Analytics counts visits in aggregate, without cookies. All indexed content is from public Arkansas General Assembly meetings. Server errors are reported to Sentry so they can be fixed; those reports leave out IP addresses, cookies and account details. Error reports you send are linked to your account so a reviewer can follow up, and are never shown publicly. The Privacy Policy has the details.
Corrections
Every transcript passage has a Report an error link. Use it for wrong words, a wrong speaker, a wrong bill, a broken video timestamp or a missing document. You need an account so we can tell reports apart from spam.
A person reviews every report. If a correction is applied, the report keeps what the page showed when you sent it, so every change can be traced back to the machine output it replaced.
For anything else, email [email protected].
Disclaimer
Said in Committee is unofficial and not affiliated with the Arkansas General Assembly. All transcripts are machine-generated and may contain errors. Documents are archived copies and may not reflect subsequent amendments. Always verify against official sources.