Talk to the City
An open-source AI tool that transforms large-scale public input into nuanced insights while preserving individual voices
About
Talk to the City (T3C) is an open-source tool that helps large groups of people coordinate by understanding each other better. It's designed for public consultations, civic dialogue, and collaborative problem-solving—any situation where many voices need to be heard and turned into actionable insights.
Unlike most AI tools, which summarize text but risk producing errors or hallucinations, T3C is built for trust, and structures the summarized public input so that every theme or idea is grounded directly in participant quotes. Its reports allow decision-makers to see broad themes, then drill down to the exact statements behind them. This design makes the analysis not only more reliable, but also auditable—participants and stakeholders can check that their words are represented faithfully.
Back in 2014, it was impossible to interview a mini public of people and aggregate their ideas while preserving the full nuance. But now, with Talk to the City's help, that cost has been reduced to essentially zero. It's broad-listening, and it can change the nature of this recursive public.
- Audrey Tang, Taiwan's 1st Digital Minister and co-author of Plurality.net
Talk to the City's analysis was crucial in identifying gender-specific challenges ... Having the data organized under specific themes, then being able to go through the interviewees actual statements, was powerful.
- Rizina Yadav, Young Women's Alliance
Sample reports
How it works
1
Collect voices at scale
Input can be survey responses, interviews, meeting transcripts, social media discussions, or structured conversations with T3C's survey AI-driven tool through WhatsApp.
2
Analyze with Large Language Models (LLM)
T3C uses large language models to identify themes and summarize specific claims.
3
Ground insights in quotes
Each summary links back to participant statements, so you can always see the source.
4
Interactive reports
Results are shared in an online report, where you can explore themes and dive into the details behind them.
Who is it for
Communities and networks
- Raise topics for deliberation
- Empower members to participate in shaping the organization
- Streamline decision making processes
Example orgs: Activist, Grass roots, DAOs
Public sector and policy makers
- Understand what your public believes and needs to inform policy
- Increase speed and clarity of decision making
- Decrease cost and time of analyzing large amounts of qualitative data
Example orgs: Gov groups, Policy analysts and evaluators
Enterprises and teams
- Make faster, more agile decisions
- Keep a finger on the pulse of your organization
- Empower staff to participate in shaping the organization
Example orgs: Executives, HR, Analysts
Why T3C is different
Depth and scale, together
Focus groups capture nuance, and polls capture scale. T3C does both.
More trustworthy than standard AI
By grounding every claim in verified quotes, T3C minimizes the hallucination problem that plagues other LLM tools.
Open-source and public-interest driven
Built by the nonprofit AI Objectives Institute, T3C is open-source and transparent by design.
Proven in practice
Governments, unions, and advocacy groups have already used T3C to turn thousands of individual voices into clear, actionable agendas.
Previous versions of Talk to the City have been used by the Taiwanese government and the Taiwan AI Assembly, unions, policy makers and more. See our case studies for more details.
Built by the AI Objectives Institute. All code is open-source on Github.
Have a question we didn't answer here, or interested in direct support in using Talk to the City? Reach out at hello@aiobjectives.org.
Media
A Privacy Hero's Final Wish
Wired
Scaling Deliberation
Foresight Institute
AI Objectives Workshops
Protocol Labs
See all our media assets in our Press Kit
