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    28 February, 2025

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    Mykolaiv

  • 28 February , 2025 Friday

  • Mykolaiv • -3° Clear sky

Mykolaiv mayor wants to use AI to hold city council sessions

Миколаївський міський голова Олександр Сєнкевич на конференції «Миколаїв — місто на хвилі». Фото: Миколаївська міська радаMykolaiv Mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych at the conference «Mykolaiv is a city on the wave». Photo: Mykolaiv City Council

Mykolaiv Mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych plans to introduce artificial intelligence to automate the process of reading out draft decisions during city council meetings.

The decision was announced on 30 January during a session of the Mykolaiv City Council, which considered 465 land issues and an additional 44 issues introduced by voice vote, NikVesti reports.

Oleksandr Sienkevych explained that reading out a large number of draft decisions takes too much time, so technology can greatly simplify this process. He instructed the city council's digital governance department to develop a system that will automatically read out the numbers of draft decisions.

«I am tasking our e-governance department, Mr Yevhen Bohachenko (director of the municipal enterprise «City Information and Computing Centre», — note), to work out the possibility of using artificial intelligence, namely, creating a voice-activated text robot that can read out the names and list of files for transcription during the meetings of the Mykolaiv City Council. For example, we discuss with the deputies what files will be on the agenda, name them, and artificial intelligence reads out the numbers of draft decisions instead of the chairman. And it does all this for me. And I'm on the video with you, we are present at the session. This information is just recorded for the transcript, for video and audio.
Because, to be honest, reading 465 files now would be very serious. There are also draft decisions made by voice,» the mayor said.

It should be noted that according to the Rules of Procedure of the Mykolaiv City Council of the VIII convocation, approved by the decision of the City Council of 24 December 2020 No. 2/35, the chairman of the plenary session clearly announces the draft decisions of the Council on which a joint vote is proposed.

Due to the large number of issues submitted for consideration, Mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych proposed to optimise the voting process by dividing all 465 land-related draft decisions into three separate packages.

The first package included draft decisions 1 to 200. It was supported by 29 deputies. The second package included drafts 201 to 400, and the MPs also voted for its adoption. The third package consisted of the remaining draft decisions, including those introduced by voice vote.

Despite the fact that the decisions were voted on in batches, the process of reading out the drafts took considerable time. According to estimates based on the YouTube recording of the session, it took about 30 minutes.

City council member Yelyzaveta Trishchanovych commented on the situation during the meeting, saying:

«It's hard work to voice all these issues,» she said.

To which Oleksandr Senkevych jokingly replied:

«I feel like Kendrick Lamar (American rapper and songwriter, — note) at a concert in Las Vegas.»

As a reminder, Mykolaiv-based agricultural company «Nibulon», which also has the status of a demining operator and a certificate for non-technical survey of territories, is going to use artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the cost of humanitarian demining.

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