Photo above: Commissioner Monique Sheffield in front of Hobby Lobby, screenshot from Cobb County YouTube video

The Cobb County Courier is experimenting with using AI to create summaries and transcriptions from the audio of county and city meetings. We’ve begun with relatively short videos with only one person speaking. The video of Commissioner Monique Sheffield’s announcement of the upcoming Olive Garden was a near-perfect length for our early testing.

[Editor’s note: For those of you in the techno-geek world (and all others can disregard this sentence), I’m programming the tools to accomplish this in the programming language Python, and using the api for openai (the ChatGPT project) and its companion tool whisper.

I’m also using the PyTube Python module to download the audio from YouTube to feed into the transcription routines for processing.]

This was one of our first tests. Cobb County released a YouTube video of District 4 Commissioner Monique Sheffield introducing the Olive Garden that will be coming to the redevelopment project where the Hobby Lobby is located.

Below we’ve embedded the county’s video, followed by the transcript we generated using AI.

Hello District 4! Commissioner Monique Sheffield here.

In my newsletter last week I mentioned that I had a big announcement to make and to share with you all, and I do, but before I do I just want to share a little bit of the history.

For the past year or so I shared with the community that there is a restaurant that we are anticipating at the Hobby Lobby Plaza on the East West Connector in Austell Road.

For the past year or so the developer has asked me to keep the restaurant under wraps. He did not want to reveal the name of the restaurant until the details were finalized, and before I share with you the name of the restaurant I’m going to give you a little bit of a teaser.

The color of my blouse represents the color of the logo of the restaurant.

We are really really excited.

There’s a great deal of development occurring at the Hobby Lobby Plaza.

We will also anticipate floor and decor where the Big Al’s Furniture currently sits. We have an Eggs Up Grill which is a brunch restaurant. We also anticipate a Mexican restaurant and that lease has already been signed which will be right next to Eggs Up Grill.

So there’s a lot of development occurring at this site. Now for the big reveal and some of you if you’re watching this video you may already guess the name of the restaurant or if you closely follow our zoning applications you may also know the name of the restaurant because they submitted a zoning application that will be heard before the Board of Commissioners this month.

Well the name of the restaurant that we anticipate having here in Austell (or now the new city of Mableton) is Olive Garden.

Yes, we anticipate an Olive Garden right here at this location where I stand which will be sandwiched between Longhorn Steakhouse and also the Juicy Crab.

Before I became Commissioner I served on the Board of Zoning Appeals and I oftentimes attended the then-Commissioner Cupid’s town hall meetings as well as her zoning meetings.

And following Facebook posts and social media posts the community has always desired additional sit-down restaurants.

‘Why can’t we have an Olive Garden?’ is what I often saw online. Well, District 4, we are getting that. We are getting an Olive Garden.

One of the other items that I’ve been working on for this development is a Sprouts supermarket.

That one is going to take a little bit more time and a little bit more chipping away before we can anticipate a Sprouts.

But I am super excited that we will have an Olive Garden at this site. It will provide another sit-down restaurant option for the community.

I’ve worked very closely with the developer and his team to get the ball rolling and to ensure that the development is on track in terms of its completion etc. In terms of breaking ground and the restaurant opening just stay tuned or receive my emails for additional details.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I appreciate you guys just waiting and anticipating and hopefully you are just as excited as I am.

I look forward to seeing you all at the ribbon-cutting and I’ll even work something out where we have gift card giveaways.

Thank you so much District 4. It is certainly a pleasure to serve you.