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AI-Powered Automatic Captions for Public Meetings

What it is for

Accessibility
  • Auto-captioning makes CFB public meetings accessible to attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing. For VAAC and All Partners meetings, human-typed CART services are also offered as an alternative.

NYC Algorithmic Tools Compliance Report — Zoom (Campaign Finance Board)

Run by
Campaign Finance Board (CFB)
Where
No fixed location
Kept
Not stated by the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation.
Shared with
Me, Not available to the accountable organization

What it is for

Accessibility

The NYC Campaign Finance Board uses Zoom's AI-powered automatic closed-caption feature during public meetings, including Board meetings, Voter Assistance Advisory Committee sessions, and All Partners meetings. The system converts spoken words into on-screen captions and transcripts in real time. Attendees may choose to enable or disable the captions during a meeting. Training data for the AI captioning model is proprietary to Zoom.

What it collects and what happens to it

Data taken in

Biometric
Identifiable data
  • The system processes spoken audio (voice) of meeting participants at CFB public meetings. This constitutes biological signals (voice) from individuals' bodies.

NYC Algorithmic Tools Compliance Report — Zoom (Campaign Finance Board)

Processing

Speech & Audio
  • Zoom uses a speech-to-text model to transcribe spoken meeting audio into real-time captions. The underlying AI model and training data are proprietary to Zoom.

NYC Algorithmic Tools Compliance Report — Zoom (Campaign Finance Board)

What it does

Sensing (Perceptive AI)
Autonomous
  • Zoom's AI listens to meeting audio and automatically converts speech to text captions in real time without human review of each transcription step.

NYC Algorithmic Tools Compliance Report — Zoom (Campaign Finance Board)

Outputs

Generated content
Identifiable data
  • The AI produces real-time captions and transcripts of the spoken content at CFB public meetings. These outputs are available to meeting attendees who opt in, and for All Partners meetings, the CART transcription is made available after the call.

NYC Algorithmic Tools Compliance Report — Zoom (Campaign Finance Board)

Run by

Campaign Finance Board (CFB)
  • The NYC Campaign Finance Board deploys Zoom with AI auto-captioning for its public meetings, including Board meetings, VAAC meetings, and All Partners meetings.

NYC Algorithmic Tools Compliance Report — Zoom (Campaign Finance Board)

Built by

Zoom Video Communications
  • Zoom is a platform service provider supplying the virtual meeting software and the proprietary AI model underlying the automatic closed-caption feature. The agency uses Zoom under a procurement or paid pilot arrangement.

NYC Algorithmic Tools Compliance Report — Zoom (Campaign Finance Board)

Kept for

Not stated by the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation.

Shared with

Available to me
  • Meeting attendees can choose to enable or disable AI-generated captions for themselves during the meeting. The CART transcription for All Partners meetings is made available to attendees after the call.

NYC Algorithmic Tools Compliance Report — Zoom (Campaign Finance Board)

Not available to the accountable organization
  • Training data for the AI captioning model is proprietary to Zoom and is not available to the CFB.

NYC Algorithmic Tools Compliance Report — Zoom (Campaign Finance Board)

Stored

Not stated by the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation.

How to read the colours

Can it identify you?

Anonymized data
Data about people with the link to who is broken. Stripped of identifiers, blurred, aggregated, or noised so this system can’t reasonably tie a record back to an individual.
Pseudonymous data
Each person’s data is tied to a token (hash, ID, template) that lets this system recognise the same person across events, but the token itself doesn’t reveal a name. Reidentification is possible with extra information.
Identifiable data
The data either contains a direct identifier (name, address, account name, recognisable face or voice, plate number) or carries a token this system uses to look up legal identity during processing.

Who completes the loop?

Human decides
This mode suggests; a person decides what to do next. The AI is always advisory — a human is in the loop on every decision. Example: a triage tool ranks cases for a clinician who chooses which to see first.
Human executes
This mode decides; a person carries out the result. Example: an optimizer plans the day’s trash-collection routes, and drivers run them.
Autonomous
This mode decides and acts on its own. No person reviews each decision or carries out the resulting action.

Definitions from the DTPR standard. Amber is about your data, violet about who decides. The fuller the shape and the deeper the colour, the more identifying the data or the less a person is involved.

What you can do

Ask about this system

Questions go to the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation, not the vendor.

Your rights

  • Right to Be Informed of AI UseAttendees at CFB public meetings are informed that Zoom's automated captions option is enabled. The captions are an opt-in feature — participants are aware of the AI system and can choose whether to use it.

Risks and safeguards

  • Reputational harmAutomatic speech recognition can produce inaccurate transcriptions, which could misrepresent a speaker's words in a public meeting record. The CFB mitigates this by offering human-typed CART services at VAAC and All Partners meetings as an alternative, and by making captions opt-in for attendees.