Transcribing Cognitive Interviews with Whisper

Section 1: Use Case Identifiers

Use Case ID: HHS-CDC-00017
Agency: HHS
Op Div/Staff Div: CDC
Use Case Topic Area: Mission-Enabling (internal agency support)
Is the AI use case found in the below list of general commercial AI products and services?
None of the above.
What is the intended purpose and expected benefits of the AI?
Federal Health Survey Research. Specifically, Cognitive interviews are a form of qualitative research where interviewers ask probing questions to understand how the interviewee understands a concept which is being asked about in a federal survey. These interviews are a key part of survey design to identify any potential misconceptions and prevent lengthy and hard to answer questions which could create potentially wrong health statistics. These interviews are time consuming to perform and report as they are inherently individual and require extensive hours to transcribe. By using AI to transcribe the interviews, researchers can potentially cut down on the hours or qualitative review, increasing the speed of research publication and quality of survey questions used on federal surveys.

Without transcripts, these interviews have to be listened to repeatedly taking at least the same amount of time as the full length of the interview to find important pieces of information for their work. These transcripts can greatly reduce the burden on researchers by enabling immediate comparison of concepts and answers along with timestamps created for researchers to reference in review.
Describe the AI system's outputs.
This AI generates transcripts from recorded interviews for staff to use when performing qualitative research to assist with Federal Health Survey research.
Stage of Development: Acquisition and/or Development
Is the AI use case rights-impacting, safety-impacting, both, or neither?
Neither

Section 2: Use Case Summary

Date Initiated: 10/2022
Date when Acquisition and/or Development began: 07/2024
Date Implemented: N/A
Date Retired: N/A
Was the AI system involved in this use case developed (or is it to be developed) under contract(s) or in-house?
Developed in-house.
Provide the Procurement Instrument Identifier(s) (PIID) of the contract(s) used.
N/A
Is this AI use case supporting a High-Impact Service Provider (HISP) public-facing service?
N/A
Does this AI use case disseminate information to the public?
N/A
How is the agency ensuring compliance with Information Quality Act guidelines, if applicable?
N/A
Does this AI use case involve personally identifiable information (PII) that is maintained by the agency?
N/A
Has the Senior Agency Official for Privacy (SAOP) assessed the privacy risks associated with this AI use case?
ongoing

Section 3: Data and Code

Do you have access to an enterprise data catalog or agency-wide data repository that enables you to identify whether or not the necessary datasets exist and are ready to develop your use case?
No
Describe any agency-owned data used to train, fine-tune, and/or evaluate performance of the model(s) used in this use case.
None, publicly available data was used to evaluate performance
Is there available documentation for the model training and evaluation data that demonstrates the degree to which it is appropriate to be used in analysis or for making predictions?
Documentation has been partially completed
Which, if any, demographic variables does the AI use case explicitly use as model features?
N/A
Does this project include custom-developed code?
N/A
Does the agency have access to the code associated with the AI use case?
N/A
If the code is open-source, provide the link for the publicly available source code.
N/A

Section 4: AI Enablement and Infrastructure

Does this AI use case have an associated Authority to Operate (ATO) for an AI system?
No
System Name: N/A
How long have you waited for the necessary developer tools to implement the AI use case?
More than 12 months
For this AI use case, is the required IT infrastructure provisioned via a centralized intake form or process inside the agency?
Yes
Do you have a process in place to request access to computing resources for model training and development of the AI involved in this use case?
Yes
Has communication regarding the provisioning of your requested resources been timely?
No
How are existing data science tools, libraries, data products, and internally-developed AI infrastructure being re-used for the current AI use case?
Re-use production level code from a different use-case
Has information regarding the AI use case, including performance metrics and intended use of the model, been made available for review and feedback within the agency?
Limited documentation for review