Listening at scale: How we used AI in a project about human interaction
Belong in Plymouth has always been about people — their voices, their ideas, and their connections to this city. Over three years, two powerful streams of work emerged. And when it came time to reflect and share, we turned to AI — not as a shortcut, but as a tool for care, clarity, and accessibility.
1. Conversations with the City
The team spoke to hundreds of Plymouth residents — in cafés, community halls, quiet corners — and gathered an extraordinary collection of real conversations. We used AI to index and archive these conversations, breaking them into fragments and themes.
Instead of a static archive, we created a searchable dialogue. Anyone can now ask questions in plain language — like “What do people say about feeling safe?” — and explore real responses from real people, surfaced with care.
Click here to try it out for yourelf >
2. The Team’s Journey
Alongside this, we captured the inner workings of the Belong in Plymouth project itself. Years of emails, meeting notes, reflections and updates were distilled into over 100 short blog posts.
Each post tells part of the story — the questions we asked, the lessons we learned, the things we got wrong and what we discovered along the way. Many include quotes from real exchanges between team members, making the behind-the-scenes work visible to anyone curious about how projects like this actually happen.
Click here to explore the journal >
Using AI in this way raises real ethical questions. These weren’t just words on a screen — they were human exchanges, open, honest and in many cases personal. So we took great care: anonymising, curating, and always placing people before process. Every fragment was carefully checked by a member of the team before being published.
I think it's often forgotten that AI can do more than create — it can help us listen, to allow us to capture and access valuable information in a way that is much more natural and dare I say it, human. It can surface the threads that connect us, and in this case, help others pick up where we left off.
This isn’t just an archive or a journal. It’s an invitation — to search, to read, to get inspired and above all, to keep the conversation going.