Kouchou AI
Taking broad listening further
Putting Talk to the City into practical use
Broad listening is the practice of collecting and visualizing the voices of many different citizens so that they can inform decision-making. We are pursuing it by improving "Talk to the City (TTTC)", an open-source AI analysis tool.
The software was first developed by the AI Objectives Institute, a nonprofit in California, and has been used in practice around the world, including in Taiwan.
Broad listening has the potential to analyze more voices than earlier methods, efficiently and without enormous manual work, to provide useful insights, and to greatly improve the speed and quality of decision-making.
History
Kouchou AI goes back to "Talk to the City" in 2023, an open-source AI broad-listening tool developed by the AI Objectives Institute in the United States.
In Japan, Takahiro Anno's team used Talk to the City in the 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election to gather and visualize posts about the election on X (formerly Twitter). Also in 2024, Nippon TV used AI opinion analysis in its coverage of the House of Representatives election, and the tool was used in the "Shin Tokyo 2050" project.
These experiences made it clear that a system was needed that non-engineers could use simply by uploading a CSV file. There were also needs beyond the original "grasp the big picture" function, such as "analyze in more depth" and "find what deserves attention". To meet them, "Kouchou AI" was developed on the basis of Talk to the City, with improvements suited to the work of Japanese local governments and politicians. On March 16, 2025, the Digital Democracy 2030 project released Kouchou AI as open source.
Use cases
Election coverage
It was used to analyze and visualize opinions on X about a House of Representatives election, as an effort to make news coverage more transparent.
Tokyo's long-term strategy, "2050 Tokyo Strategy (draft)"
It was used to gather citizens' voices for drafting the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's long-term strategy, the "2050 Tokyo Strategy (draft)".
Risks and challenges
AI analysis does come with caveats. It needs to be used carefully, with attention to background and context, so as not to rely too heavily on the results.
In particular, opinions online tend to be skewed, so we do not intend TTTC results to be reflected directly in policy. The decision-making process should be discussed separately by the adopting body, such as a government or local government, which should decide its course after thorough examination.
It is also useful to diversify sources of information rather than relying only on the internet, for example through town meetings and direct interviews. As data for broad listening, too, it is important to collect the diverse voices that come in by phone or offline. We believe that collecting many kinds of voices and then visualizing the whole picture makes this a system that supports better decisions.