Legal Question in Civil Litigation in California

Re: Transcription system?

You are not allowed to bring your own recording equipment into the courtroom, so even if you can find such a system you won't be able to use it.

Additionally, California law requires that court transcripts be produced by certified shorthand reporters. For the most part these reporters have to be physically present in the courtroom during the hearing or trial. There is a pilot program in a few courts in which proceedings are recorded and can be transcribed later, but even this program requires the transcript to come from a court reporter rather than a computer.

Even if you could do this -- and even if your software could accurately transcribe several different voices from different parts of the room (*very* unlikely) and identify who is saying what (all but impossible with present technology) -- the transcript you generate would be unofficial and you would still have to pay for an official copy in order to use it on appeal or in a variety of other ways.

In addition to all of these problems, computer voice recognition systems just aren't good enough to do this sort of thing. I have a very sophisticated voice system on my relatively powerful computer, and it works quite well when I dictate into it. However, I spent an hour or so training it on my voice before I began dictating, and it has learned to recognize my speech better by analyzing my corrections. I also read what it writes so that I can correct errors as they come up.

My system would not work nearly as well for someone else until she had also trained it to recognize her voice. Even then, it can only recognize one person's voice at a time and there is no way for multiple people to use it simultaneously. I also wear a *very* specialized headset microphone about an inch from my mouth, and I dictate in a private office with very little background noise. You won't be able to replicate these conditions in court. Court proceedings almost always involve at least two speakers, and often many more. The court will not require anyone to wear special microphones for your convenience, so your microphones would be quite far from the participants. There is often enough background noise in court to make regular tape recordings difficult to understand, and if people have a hard time understanding then a computer will be completely lost.

The technology you have in mind may become practical in a few years, but it doesn't exist yet.