Court Reporter Software: Looks A Lot Like Digital Court Reporting

So, I was on LinkedIn today, reading one of the strings on the AAERT group.  As usual, LisaMigliore Black is on there fighting an uphill battle trying to “educate” digital court reporters on how useless they are.  Then C.J. from Docu-Rom made a very good point.  He asked Mig to educate us on what, exactly, is Stenograph AudioSync.

I knew about AudioSync, but until I read the Stenograph page dedicated to it, I didn’t realize how shockingly similar it is to digital court reporting software, and how bad it makes stenographic court reporters look.  Here’s a brief passage from the Stenograph website:

AudioSync (for stenographers)

Lighten your load

The days of carrying that clumsy tape recorder are over! Record the testimony right to your laptop computer. Since the audio is synchronized to the text, you can simply click a button and play it right where you are. Replay the segment as many times as you need to hear it correctly. No more rewinding and replaying over and over again. No more guesswork. No more [INAUDIBLE] in the transcript.

Edit faster than before

You or your scopist can play back any passages that seem ambiguous. With the click of a button, you can listen to the passage as many times as necessary until you are confident that you’ve heard it right. Stop, start, and replay by moving your cursor and clicking a button. It’s that easy.

To a lay person, it might seem that stenographers not using AudioSync will produce transcripts with [INAUDIBLE]s throughout, but I’m sure Lisa would disagree.  The ad also alludes to the fact that stenographers don’t always hear everything “correctly,” and that with AudioSnyc, they can replay this single-track audio “as many times as [they] need” in order to get it right.

So, riddle me this.  How is that Lisa Migliore Black can get away with hacking away at digital court reporters without disclosing the fact that her recording is inferior, when the company that makes her equipment, the company that has a vested interest in court reporters’ viability, admits to a court reporter’s inability to “hear it correctly?”

Going a step further, isn’t it amazing how closely related the AudioSync software looks to digital court reportingsoftware?  Has there been a lawsuit about this?  I’ve got to think that JAVs or FTR has some patents on this stuff.  If so, come on guys, let’s move on this.

Basically, AudioSync is a poor man’s digital court reporting system.  All it does is sync a single-channel audio file to some notes.  I have an iPad app that does that!  Maybe Stenograph should change their name and start selling wares on both sides of the fence.

Either way you slice it, the fact that Stenograph has sold so many copies of AudioSync shows that:

1. Stenographic court reporters are fallible.
2. Stenographic court reporters don’t hear it correctly all of the time.
3. Not all court reporters have AudioSync.

Some court reporters don’t even have backup audio, period.  That fact, combined with the three items listed above, make digital court reporting an obvious choice without even talking about the price!  Let’s not forget Justice Michael McDonald’s take on stenography:

“The court reporter’s transcript is the rankest of hearsay; you’re just trusting she hears it correctly.”