AI-powered interview answers people's questions about transgender issues in real time

Bhumika Shrestha is the first Nepali to travel abroad on an "other" gender passport, as well as a transgender rights activist and politician in Nepal. You can ask her any questions about her experiences and transgender issues in Nepal in this interactive interview – she will reply in real time, and her answers will be supplemented by context cards to present a fuller picture.

"Bhumika can speak for herself" is a project powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and voice recognition technology, published in September as part of the Red-Letter Project from Asia Weekly, China Daily's edition serving the Asia-Pacific region.

Viewers can either ask Shrestha questions out loud or in writing, and her reply will be created automatically from an at-length video interview conducted by Marc Lajoie, senior multimedia reporter, Asia Weekly.

Lajoie, who joined China Daily in March from the Wall Street Journal, produces multimedia projects for the Red-Letter Project, an initiative for experimenting with online storytelling styles.

"It started just with the idea and the realisation that this was possible with some of the new technology out there, that we could recognise voice, we could use AI to understand these questions, and it's also possible to cut together video on the fly, so that's how it works to then answer those questions. The next step was to think what would be a good way to apply this technology," he said.

The project is powered by IBM Watson's natural language processing capabilities, as well as "home-brewed" tools created by Lajoie.

He chose transgender issues as the focus for the project because it is a topic that news organisations around the world struggle to cover due to the lack of diversity in newsrooms.

This format allowed Shrestha to tell her own story, in her own words.

"In my case, I am a white male, cisgender, heterosexual, from a rich country. My framing of her story wouldn't be helpful," Lajoie told Journalism.co.uk.

"This technology lets me step back and put her centre stage, and not direct the conversation, not determine what from what she's saying is important.

"I step back and I'm a facilitator of the conversation between the audience and the subject."

As a transgender activist and politician, Shrestha can answer questions on a variety of topics, offering insights into her own personal experiences such as travelling abroad, and discussing the treatment of transgender people in Nepal.

The format of the interview also creates empathy, explained Lajoie. Viewers can establish a connection to Shrestha as she's discussing her personal concerns that they would not necessarily be able to tap into when reading her words as presented in a more traditional interview format.

To ensure the interview remains journalistic, context cards appear throughout, adding an extra layer of information to Shrestha's answers, and at times, fact-checking her statements.

"Since it's one person carrying the whole project, they needed to have answers for more or less anything you can ask that's more or less on topic.

"Because she's a politician and an activist, [it's important] not just to have her speaking, but to also have that journalistic context coming up," he said.

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