NextGov/FCW: “Public broadcasting has a long history of capturing important moments in American life. It preserved voices from the civil rights movement, debates over war and foreign policy, regional arts coverage and local public affairs programs that reflected the people and places shaping the nation. But many of those moments have also been hard to find, buried in tape vaults, archives and library collections that few people would ever be able to search or even really know about. That is part of what makes the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) so interesting. A collaboration between GBH, which is the Boston public media organization formerly known as WGBH, and the Library of Congress, the archive is working to make historic public media more searchable and accessible, in part by using AI-generated transcripts as a starting point.  The public-facing correction layer for that effort is called FixIt+, a volunteer platform where people can review and refine machine-generated transcripts from older radio and television programs. As AAPB Archives Outreach Manager Meghan Sorensen explained in an interview published by the Library of Congress, “FixIt+ is a volunteer transcript correction platform and open-source project maintained by our team at GBH for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Its mission is to make historic public media more accessible by inviting the public to help update and correct computer-generated transcripts in a way that feels easy and engaging.”…That problem becomes much more obvious when the recordings are older. In trying out and working with FixIt+, I spent time with broadcasts from the 1960s and 1970s, and the limitations were easy to hear. The audio may have been broadcast quality for its time, but by modern standards it can sound thin, noisy or compressed. Regional accents can make the software hesitate, and background sounds only make the job harder. If the archive simply accepted the AI-generated text as final, there would almost certainly be mistakes left behind. I found quite a few pretty obvious ones within the first several minutes of using the platform. They were not huge errors, but for important historical moments, the transcripts should be as accurate as possible. FixIt+ handles that problem in a practical way. As I listened to audio or watched the old television program, I could type my suggested correction directly into the line on the transcript. Once I saved the change, it became part of the archive workflow so that other volunteers could review what I had done. They could then approve my change or suggest an alternative. Only after a transcript reaches volunteer consensus is it treated as complete. The project describes this as a “human-in-the-loop” process, meaning people improve transcripts generated by computers instead of relying on the software alone. Sorensen put the larger point plainly: “Technology gives us a great jumping-off point, but it is our volunteers who make the real difference.”