SocratesAI

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Inspiration

In today’s digital world, misinformation spreads rapidly, influencing critical areas like politics and health. With the exponential growth of online information —both true and misleading— fact-checking has never been more important.

AI has revolutionized research, enabling in-depth analysis at a speed and depth impossible for humans. We believe AI should play a crucial role in ensuring discussions remain informed, reliable, and insightful. Inspired by Socrates' pursuit of truth, we built SocratesAI, an AI-powered real-time fact-checking assistant for Zoom calls.

What It Does

SocratesAI is an AI agent that actively listens to conversations during Zoom meetings, continuously fact-checking statements by searching the web in real time. It not only verifies the reliability of spoken information but also enriches discussions with relevant insights and supporting data.

At the end of each call, it provides a summary report with key insights, flagged inaccuracies, and recommendations for deeper exploration.

How We Built It

SocratesAI combines multiple cutting-edge technologies to deliver real-time fact-checking:

Zoom Real-Time Media Stream (RTMS): Allows us to access the conversation’s transcript using Zoom’s built-in voice-to-text converter.

A contextual sliding window dynamically updates with the conversation’s key points using OpenAI ChatGPT-4o, ensuring long-term context retention without excessive input size.

Perplexity Sonar then evaluates the last conversation chunk and context, determining truthfulness, providing explanations, and linking to reliable sources.

To enhance engagement, the response is converted into speech using ElevenLabs' text-to-speech model Flash V2, allowing the AI to deliver information smoothly within the conversation.

Challenges We Ran Into

Real-time processing: we needed to balance response speed and accuracy. We solved this by batching the transcript into small but meaningful segments that preserve context while keeping latency low.

Understanding irony and figurative speech: careful prompting helped improve AI comprehension and minimize misinterpretations.

Minimizing disruption: instead of interrupting speakers, SocratesAI provides subtle auditory cues and a visual popup with a brief fact-check summary. Users can choose to ignore the cues or let the AI deliver a full audio response.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

Seamlessly integrating multiple AI models and services into a single, real-time fact-checking system orchestrated with LangChain.

Designing an AI-human interaction model that enhances conversations without being intrusive.

What We Learned

User experience is critical—our peer surveys helped refine interaction preferences and ensure minimal disruption.

Latency vs. accuracy trade-offs—finding the optimal balance between quick responses and detailed context analysis is key.

The incredible impact on society of misinformation and the urgency for robust solutions to check information's reliability.

What's Next for SocratesAI

Enhancing answer quality and reducing latency. Improving the AI’s understanding of irony, sarcasm, and figurative speech. Expanding to multilingual interactions. Adapting SocratesAI for critical environments such as classrooms, legal courts, and professional debates where information accuracy is essential.