About · YouSaid · OTA Media
Eight billion people.
A few thousand voices.
The decisions that shape the world, what gets legislated, funded, built and normalised, are made by a cast small enough to fit in a stadium. Most of the world only ever reads second-hand accounts of what that cast said.
Nobody can fact-check eight billion people. A few thousand, you can. Because the world's decisions have a surprisingly small cast, a verbatim, checkable record of what they actually said is not a dream of scale. It is an achievable project, and we are building it source by source: parliaments, the United Nations, and the world's long-form interviews, from 1946 to this week.
The rules do not bend, and the machines are what enforce them. AI transcribes, translates and verifies at a scale no newsroom could reach. It never writes a word of what you read. Every line is verbatim and credited to its source, and links to that source wherever it can be linked. Translations we make are marked as translations. Where the official record is itself an interpretation, as at the United Nations, the page says so. Podcast episodes that declare AI-generated or cloned voices are excluded at ingest. Where a speaker cannot be identified with certainty we attribute nothing: the line is published without a name, never under a guess.
YouSaid is not an official version of any legislature's proceedings. Every line is reproduced accurately from the published record and linked to it, but the official version is the one the legislature itself publishes, and where the two differ that one is authoritative.
YouSaid is the record of what was said, for the eight billion who were not in the room.
Who builds it
YouSaid is built by Edwin Danso, founder and chief executive of OTA Media Limited, who is also the company's sole director and carries editorial responsibility for the record. He spent six years building Off The Agenda, the leadership interview series the corpus grew out of, and worked in professional services and in politics before that.
The company is founder-led and small on purpose. What it is not short of is provenance: it is registered in England and Wales, registered with the Information Commissioner, a member of NVIDIA Inception and of the Content Authenticity Initiative, and the corpus itself is deposited and citable. The links below go outward to independent registers rather than to pages we control, which is the same rule the record runs on. A claim is worth what its source is worth.
Edwin Danso
Founder, Chief Executive and Chief Technology Officer, OTA Media Limited
MemberWhat each number counts
We publish several counts and they do not agree, because they count different things. Rather than reduce them to one, here is what each one is.
- Lines on the record.
- Passages a search can actually return. A line that is suppressed, or held back awaiting translation, is not counted, because a number nobody can reach is not coverage.
- Speaker-verified leaders.
- People holding at least one reachable line whose identity resolves to an official parliamentary directory. It is the strictest of these figures and therefore the smallest. It is a count of identities, not of names.
- Leaders indexed.
- Distinct person-shaped names carrying at least one reachable line. Larger than the verified figure because broadcast speakers are not in any parliamentary directory, and because two records of one person under two spellings count twice here and once there.
- Directory entries.
- People we hold an identity for, whether or not we hold a word they said. A directory entry with no lines behind it is a person we can name and cannot yet quote.
- Interviews.
- Episodes holding at least one reachable line. A count of episodes, not of anything we own.
Notes on the Record
The cheapest thing in the world is a quotation
A monthly column on the primary record of public speech. All notes