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High Courts in India Skip Court Reporters in Favor of IVR Technology

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

What most of us know about court reporting we probably learned from movies and reruns of “Law & Order.” In these shows, a person sits near the judge and uses a mysterious machine to take down all that's said during the proceedings. It's a familiar image that's decades old, but in some parts of the world, it's starting to change, thanks to technology.

In the high courts of Mumbai, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Delhi, India, it's not a person taking dictation during court proceedings. Each day, hundreds of thousands of dictations, court orders and petitions are dictated and converted to text documents using Nuance Communications’ (News - Alert) Dragon NaturallySpeaking software, a speech recognition technology.

“I regularly give dictations running into hundreds of pages. But availability of stenographers was always an issue. With the Dragon software, I can now give dictations even at midnight from my home,” said Karnataka Dipen S, a practicing attorney in AP High Court, in post in India's Business Standard today. “The accuracy is almost 97 per cent and the typing speed is very fast. I have drafted hundreds of petitions and the software actually learns from experience.”

The technology used in a court in this way is more than a bit ground-breaking. Nuance, which powers Apple’s (News - Alert) Siri speech-enabled personal assistant in its iPhone 4S, says that this is a first-of-its-kind initiative in India, where voice solutions have been adopted by the judiciary to read out judgments in courts. Sunny Rao, who is the managing director (India and South East Asia) for Nuance, adds that Nuance’s voice solutions are also being used by the Income Tax Department, RBI and NABARD in the region.

The legal version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software allows users to dictate documents, send and manage e-mail and give commands to their computers. Nuance claims it allows for text transcription at three times the speed of typing. The software offers a pre-configured vocabulary with over 30,000 legal terms, automatically formats legal citations and supports third-party correction to help you achieve accuracy in dictating. One can dictate into a hand-held device and Dragon Legal will transcribe the audio and send it to PC.