10:30–11:45 / Wednesday May 13
Listening at Scale: Building AI Tools for Audio and Video Monitoring
Journalists are surrounded by audio and video they cannot keep up with, from civic meetings and police scanners to podcasts and livestreams. This session shows how multimodal AI systems listen and watch at scale, turning overwhelming streams into usable story leads. Drawing on tools built at Verso, the speaker demos a real-time police scanner monitor and a system analyzing how narratives spread on The Joe Rogan Experience. Attendees then build and adapt a simple video analysis workflow of their own, leaving with a working prototype they can apply to any beat.
// speakers
Kaveh Waddell
Co-founder and principal
Verso
LinkedIn →Kaveh Waddell is co-founder and principal at Verso, an AI lab for newsrooms and nonprofits. Kaveh was a '24 John S. Knight fellow and Human-Centered AI Institute fellow at Stanford University; previously, he led technology investigations at Consumer Reports, launched the AI beat at Axios, and reported on privacy and surveillance for The Atlantic. Verso trains and builds AI systems for major media clients including Axios, NOTUS, Schibsted, ZDF, Stanford, CUNY, and the American Journalism Project.