Exciting News: GailBot Wins Sage Concept Grant

We are proud to announce that GailBot has been awarded £15,000 in funding through the Sage Concept Grant for 2023. This support will enable us to further develop our groundbreaking automated dialogue transcription tool. We would like to thank the Sage team, especially Dr. Daniela Duca, for their support.

How We Will Use the Funding

Phase I: Integrating GailBot into Existing Workflows

Timeline: 2 weeks

Estimated Cost: $3,000 (primarily for travel)

We will conduct a workshop at Loughborough University to demonstrate GailBot’s capabilities and integrate it directly into the workflows of Conversation Analytic researchers. Custom plugin suites will be developed for each lab through extensive in-person collaboration. Additionally, we will recruit 4-5 Research Assistants (RAs) at Tufts to form a year-long development team, scaling GailBot’s infrastructure and adding methods for detecting paralinguistic features based on initial workshop feedback.

Phase II: Development Sprint and Focus Groups

Timeline: 5 months

Estimated Cost: $7,000 (Travel, software tools, and Research Assistant funding)

During this phase, we will work with collaborators from the initial Loughborough visit to scale GailBot’s core pipeline and develop custom releases for each collaborating lab. The first three months will focus on initial development and release, with the remaining two months dedicated to bug fixes and support. A mid-project review will be conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands, where we will demonstrate new capabilities, provide a free open-source release, and recruit collaborators for transcript evaluation.

Phase III: Development Sprint, Evaluation, and Demonstration

Timeline: 6 months

Estimated Cost: $8,000 (Travel, evaluation, and RA costs)

We will evaluate GailBot transcripts using human annotators, comparing them with manually generated transcripts. This phase will culminate in the publication of a paper in ROLSI, documenting the benefits and drawbacks of using automated transcripts at scale. Finally, we will host a workshop at UCLA, inviting all collaborators and the Conversation Analysis community in North America, and release GailBot as an open-source tool maintained by a large community of volunteers.