Alerts from RootWise Frequency bring local conversations to your inbox from FM radio across the globe. They come from Somalia, where tribal loyalists debated whether and how to support federal troops in their fight against Al Shabaab. In Kenya, Chinese state media patiently tap a drumbeat of slanted takes in The Swahili Hour. Radio DJs in Benin debate whether questioning their government's narrative on a brutal JNIM terrorist attack is good journalism or alarmist propaganda.

Still, a customer came to us with a problem: How do they leverage the daily alerts into their reporting chain with greater context? Radio, with its hyperlocal focus, vivid sound, and authentic voice, is chopped up into digestible bites, organized and filtered into a neat little email. The alerts provide critical detail for daily operations, but our customer wants a way to easily see and track the big picture. The most important stories don't neatly unfold in a single day across all our monitored stations. They jump from station to station one day before another. Some morph or metastasize with new voices and divergent points of view.

RootWise Frequency provides near-real-time global access to these conversations through our dashboard and alerts. But to close observers, the alert emails were becoming messy. Content would linger day after day. Developing conversations would be chopped up into one-day snapshots that robbed them of their context and value. We needed a better vehicle to present the stories cohesively.

The customer's insight drove us to innovate and fill that gap in our service. We created a new data model for an "event." An event begins as a single radio clip meeting project-specific thresholds for relevance. It then grows in scope and authority as more related broadcast clips are aired and matched for clustering to the original. An LLM constantly rewrites the event summary with new key facts and quotes while the coverage timeline provides a detailed map to the evolution of the narrative.

An example of this hyperlocal narrative evolution is found in this event from DRC radio concerning Congolese refugees in a camp in Burundi. First, a report emerged from a local station in South Kivu that 200 refugees who sought to leave the camp were threatened by police with warning shots. A frustrated refugee spoke by phone to Radio Mandeleo denouncing a lack of food, medicine, and shelter while asking the UN for better assistance. Next, a UN-backed national FM station spent two consecutive days dissecting a press conference held by ministers from the government in Kinshasa that acknowledged problems in the camps while blaming Rwandan-backed provocateurs and cuts in US aid. Our technology caught the story early and stayed dialed in as it quickly evolved in scope and impact.

RootWise is able to enrich our core offering to include events feeds at no additional cost. It sprang from our passion and experience in social data analysis with the dizzying opportunity today's LLM revolution presents when expertly harnessed and deployed.

In the last 18 months, we've implemented changes with core service providers to improve transcription three times. As models improve, increases to accuracy, context, and breadth of supported languages are too profound to ignore. For example, Google Gemini now effortlessly handles Nigerian hosts and callers who slip between English and native languages from sentence to sentence. We combine mature data science tools like text embeddings and entity extraction with a robust LLM prompt architecture for state-of-the-art reasoning models that didn't exist even a few months ago to expose nuanced event clusters at a cost-efficient scale.

The result is that each customer gets a curated collection of news events and narratives relevant to their mission to browse on demand. Our Events page has become our most popular and accessible offering since its debut in the early fall. We then augmented our daily alerts structure with on-demand, dynamic event objects that accumulate the latest insights even after inbox delivery.

RootWise Helps Unlock Access With Unique Data

RootWise develops powerful tools that unlock access to conversation that traditionally have been hidden or difficult to understand. We pair that with our deep expertise distilling social data into timely findings and actionable briefs. The combination is a unique ability to hear local, influential voices on critical issues that impact your mission at previously unimaginable speed and scale.