Court reporter versus court recorder.
In today’s high-tech world of technology ever changing and improving, court reporters continually come under attack by possibilities of being replaced by machines. As machines seem to improve and computers become faster and are able to perform vast different tasks seemingly simultaneously, one facet of life seems to stand out alone among all the rest; voice recognition.
With voice recognition, computers are supposed to be able to listen to a person’s voice and then instantaneously transcribe the words into text. Even though voice recognition has come a long way since dictating machines, one particular peculiarity stands out in blazing obvious hindrance; voice dialect, tone and meaning.
A recording device may compute what it thinks it hears but an entirely different word was actually used due to dialect, which machines cannot comprehend. This small and sometimes minor discrepancy may seem frivolous to the outside world, but in the world of justice and litigation it can mean the difference in swaying the jury one way or the other when a single word is recorded and typed incorrectly.
Machines have their place in society and we have become dependent upon their necessity in creating our world of speed and functionality. But in the world of justice and the world of the legal written word, where every word holds the utmost importance, not only on its meaning but in the context in which it was used, the human ear cannot be replaced by a machine; simply because machines cannot think nor reason nor understand the inflection of a voice or desired meaning behind the words.
Court reporters can be replaced by court recordings but on appeal or when the words need to be put on paper, only a human can listen, reason and hear the true words spoken which in litigation makes all the difference in winning or losing and justice rings true. Who do you trust; a machine, which does not think, or a human that has far greater abilities than a machine and an ear that transcends far above any listening device any man can invent?
We employ highly trained and skilled certified reporters who have spent years listening and writing complex hard to understand legal words so that the jury has no doubt the words being spoken or read in trials and mediations are 100% the actual words spoken without any possibility the batteries died or the power grid went down even for a second.
Forrest Tyler is the chief marketing officer of Southwest Court Reporting & Legal Video, based in Dallas, Texas and established in 1972. For more information regarding court reporting, or litigation support please visit our website at www.courtreportingdallas.com
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