Teaching a machine to hear a Greek municipal council

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is an English adaptation of a post I originally wrote in Greek for the Schema Labs Substack. The original is here: Μαθαίνοντας μια μηχανή να ακούει ένα ελληνικό δημοτικό συμβούλιο.

OpenCouncil transcribes Greek municipal council meetings with ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition), and then someone fixes the AI’s mistakes by hand. The team spends several hours on each meeting to get those corrections right, so the final transcript matches the audio. That led us to a question: can we fine-tune an open ASR model on OpenCouncil’s own data and cut down the time spent on manual corrections? I’m Angelos, and this is the problem I’m working on for my Google Summer of Code project.

OpenCouncil on Angelos Papamichail

Teaching a machine to hear a Greek municipal council