The San Jose City Clerk’s Office has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) translation platform which uses real-time AI transcription capabilities, providing immediate translation and captions to mobile phones, computers, and video displays.
“We’re about 40 percent foreign born and over 50 percent of our households speak another language other than English at home,” said Matt Mahan, Mayor of San Jose. “When we talk about access to government and resources and barriers to participation, language shouldn’t be one. Technology increasingly gives us the ability to break down those barriers.”
Produced by Wordly, an AI language services company, it allows people to understand and participate in city governance in their native language. The solution also enables community members who prefer reading captions to actively participate in meetings.
At a recent city council meeting, invited community-based organisations and neighbourhood groups, were able use the platform and provide feedback to Toni Taber, the city clerk, who administers democratic processes such as elections, city records, and transparency.
“The potential is for all cities to be more inclusive,” she told Cities Today. “This goes beyond just language learners. I had feedback from one person who uses English at work, yet in their daily life it was exciting to hear the council meeting in her native language. That was a powerful statement to me because we always focus on what people need to participate, but not what they need to feel comfortable and welcomed.”
Taber foresees the platform being extended into other departments after further road testing by residents and said that colleagues are already asking about access to the software for their own community meetings.
Harnessing AI
San Jose, the capital of Silicon Valley, has long taken advantage of new technologies. It is an area rich in innovation and has more patents per capita than any other city in the country, including AI and machine learning.
“We’re seeing incredible entrepreneurship and innovation happening outside of government,” said Mahan, during a recent What Works City webinar. “City Hall is very motivated to bring that same spirit of innovation to government because I actually think the public sector has the most to gain from embracing these technologies.”
In addition to fostering an innovation economy outside of government, the city also invites entrepreneurs and academics – including its downtown university – into government to help officials transform how San Jose delivers services.
“We are using AI to optimise bus routes, for example, to ensure that people have a smoother and faster ride to work or wherever they need to go,” he said. “And we’re beginning to use AI to detect objects in the roadway to help us achieve our vision zero goals of having zero traffic fatalities.”
Because San Jose has the largest Vietnamese population of any city outside of Vietnam, it has been able to use the city’s own training set from Vietnamese language data it has compiled from all public queries, to improve the Google Translate base model.
“And we did a very innovative partnership early on, where in exchange for providing telecommunication companies access to public infrastructure for their devices, we get funding for closing the digital divide,” he said. “We’ve been able to expand broadband access to thousands of families in San Jose because of our innovative partnerships with some of the larger telecom companies.”
GovAI Coalition
San Jose was instrumental in launching the GovAI Coalition which now includes over 150 cities and counties across the country. Challenges such as procurement, how to set up privacy policies, how to properly evaluate vendors for cybersecurity risk, and the right questions to ask, are discussed among city peers.
This has now led to the creation of a vendor registry list in which members are using vetting tools and starting to certify vendors.
“I’d encourage folks to look at our GovAI coalition,” he added. “One of the things that’s discussed are different use cases cities are exploring and the solutions of potential vendors. The whole idea is to accelerate our learning by just sharing what we’re all doing.”
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