The Waco Bridge is proud to announce the launch of an audio service aimed at making our work more accessible and useful.
At the top of each story, you will find an embedded audio element from Everlit. Click on it, and you’ll get a machine-generated audio version of our human-generated content.
We hope this feature will serve those with visual impairments as well as folks who are on the move and want to experience what our nonprofit local newsroom produces. You can even adjust the speed to your liking.
I talked to Toby Kurosky, executive director of the accessibility advocacy group Mobilize Waco, and he is looking forward to the rollout. Toby is visually impaired and uses a 60-inch screen to access content on news websites, including ours. For now he uses a screen reader, but he said a dedicated audio tool should be easier to use.
“If it’s designed to read strictly the article, it should be far superior to a screen reader,” he said.
Like a lot of people, I’m a fence-sitter on the ultimate impact of artificial intelligence, which is coming upon us like a thunderstorm. Call it a blessing or a curse, but it can’t be ignored.
For now, I can appreciate the tools that AI affords journalists in proofreading copy, transcribing interviews and helping us locate and crunch data. I’m also excited about ways we can use AI to make our content more useful to you, including the audio feature.
At the same time, my commitment as Waco Bridge editor-in-chief remains firm: We are human journalists, providing a human audience with stories about your fellow human beings.
We will be transparent about any journalistic use of AI, and we will always verify any information it generates.
Though we are an editorially independent newsroom, we align with the code of ethics created by our sister publication, The Texas Tribune. Our principles include the following:
- We don’t publish text generated by AI tools unless we have verified and edited it.
- Our journalists won’t rely on generative tools as a primary source of information.
- We’ll tell you if we use AI for journalistic purposes such as data analysis, chatbots or interactive modules.
- We will not use AI to generate images for news stories.
I’m interested in your thoughts on our new audio tool and what you see as the perils and promise of AI in journalism. Drop me a line at j.b.smith@wacobridge.org.
Let’s keep building together.
