Fact checking keeps getting more interesting. This week the Washington Post debuted an early version of an online tool to help people spot false claims that politicians say in speeches, TV ads or interviews.

The web application Truth Teller was built by The Washington Post, with funding from a Knight News Prototype grant.

See how it works. Or at least, how it's supposed to work.

The basic idea is that when a politician or pundit is discussing an issue on TV, Truth Teller will display "TRUE" or "FALSE" in real time next to them as they speak. But for now the scope is very limited. Due to the complexity of the technologies involved, the system must be manually hand-fed facts. Potentially fact-based statements are automatically parsed out of the live video through speech recognition technology augmented by algorithms, and matched against established facts.

For the time being, it's focused on one national topic: tax reform.

Why tax reform? In a guest post to the Knight blog, Cory Haik (Washington Post Executive Producer for Digital News) explained:

"[We chose tax reform] because of its timing and importance. The tax debate will play out over several months and naturally lends itself to deceit and deception -- even moreso than many policy discussions. We hope that our application will help direct the conversation toward the truth as it is happening so that Americans get a fair shot at deciding this critical issue."

Collaborating with the Post on this project was Dan Schultz, creator of MIT's Truth Goggles project, which KDMC covered earlier.

Where could this project lead? Maybe to a parking lot in your community! Haik wrote:

"What you see in the prototype is actual live fact checking -- each time the video is played the fact checking starts anew. It needs more technical work and we need more facts, but it works and we'll keep working on it. Can this be applied to streaming video in the future? Yes. Can this work if someone is holding up a phone to record a politician in the middle of a parking lot in Iowa? Yes, we believe it can."