How it's built, in brief
An honest overview of the architecture, with one stated limit: we don't describe the specific models and heuristics with which we extract and judge the claims. Not out of vanity, but so as not to help anyone who might want to game the system — the robustness of an automated fact-check also depends on not making it easy to fool.
Watch a fact-check happen
Pick a claim spoken live and follow the four steps, from audio to the outcome with its source. No real data: an illustrative reconstruction.
The pipeline
A broadcast's path is linear: we capture the audio of the public stream, we transcribe it, isolate the verifiable claims, compare them against the sources and publish the verdict on the real-time timeline. Each step is an isolated component: this makes the system robust and lets us improve one without touching the others.
Local transcription
Transcription happens on our servers, not on external services. The audio doesn't leave our infrastructure and the broadcasts' content — which is public anyway — is not handed to third parties. It's a choice of privacy and control.
Verification anchored to sources
Each claim is compared against a curated index of primary sources and, when needed, with a live search restricted to authoritative public domains. The verdict always cites the source: title, body, link and excerpt, so anyone can check. The language-analysis systems we use are state of the art; which ones and how they're configured we don't disclose, and that's a deliberate choice.
Real time and scale
The verdicts reach the browser via WebSocket and are synchronised with the player. The verification work is done only once per broadcast and streamed to every viewer: the system handles many people on the same event without multiplying the computation.
Infrastructure and data in Europe
We're a European company. The infrastructure that delivers the service and your account data reside on servers in Germany, in the European Union. Traffic is encrypted end-to-end (TLS) and protected by a distribution and security network in front of the origin. On the site we use only technical cookies, without profiling, and we collect strictly necessary account data. Payments are handled by our provider: card data neither passes through nor is stored by our systems. The full picture is in the Privacy Policy.
Reliability
Each component has a dedicated health check and the processing jobs shut themselves down at the end of the broadcast: no resources left on for no reason, no orphaned jobs.
The areas we're working on are described on the Research page; the milestones already reached in Improvements.