Spooky Season Is Here. Don’t Let AI Transcription Claims Haunt Your Court.

October has arrived. The decorations are going up, the days are getting shorter, and spooky season is officially underway.

But for courts evaluating speech-to-text technology, ghosts and goblins may not be the scariest thing lurking around the corner.

It might be the promise of “AI-powered,” “proprietary,” or “next-generation” transcription technology that sounds extraordinary in a demonstration—but tells you remarkably little about how it will perform in an actual courtroom.

A new September 2026 resource bulletin from the Joint Technology Committee (JTC), AI-Assisted Transcription in Courts: Governance, Use, and Safeguards, offers courts a timely reality check.

And much of its guidance reinforces something we at Liberty have believed from the beginning:

Speech-to-text should be treated as a powerful tool—not a magic trick (or treat).

Start With the Problem, Not the AI

One of the simplest recommendations in the JTC bulletin may also be the most important:

“Before undertaking an AI-assisted transcription project, courts should identify the specific problem they are trying to solve.”  

That sounds obvious.

Yet the current AI market often encourages organizations to work backward: find an impressive technology first, then determine where it might fit.

Courts deserve better.

Are you trying to make recorded proceedings searchable? Give judges faster access to testimony? Provide draft transcripts? Improve accessibility? Reduce transcription turnaround time? Support staff working through a reporting shortage?

Those are different problems, with different risks and different requirements.

The JTC notes that courts are generally using AI transcription to support digital recording, create draft text, improve searchability, and enhance accessibility—not simply replace certified court reporting.

That distinction matters.

The Recording Still Comes First

Perhaps the bulletin's most significant point is also one of the least glamorous:

Good transcription starts with good audio.

The JTC states plainly that AI-assisted transcription “depends first on a reliable digital recording system for court proceedings.” It goes on to emphasize that clear source audio is foundational to transcript accuracy and that multi-channel recording can help distinguish speakers and support review.

That should change the way courts evaluate STT vendors.

A transcription engine cannot recover information that was never captured clearly in the first place.

Poor microphone pickup, overlapping speakers, courtroom acoustics, HVAC noise, paper movement, side conversations, and inconsistent audio levels can all affect the output. The bulletin specifically warns that real-world courtroom conditions can materially degrade transcription performance.

In other words:

The most impressive AI demo in the world cannot compensate for a bad record.

That is why Liberty has always viewed speech-to-text as part of a broader recording ecosystem—not as a replacement for one.

About That “Proprietary AI”…

Here is where a little healthy skepticism is warranted.

Speech recognition technology has advanced extraordinarily quickly. High-quality engines are increasingly available from major cloud providers, specialized vendors, open-source projects, and other technology platforms.

That is good news for courts.

It also means the phrase “proprietary AI” should begin, not end, the procurement conversation.

• What exactly is proprietary?
• Is the vendor developing the underlying speech-recognition model?
• Are they licensing or integrating another provider's engine?
• Can the transcription engine change over time?
• Where is the audio processed?
• Is court data retained?
• Can it be used for model training?
• What happens if the underlying provider changes?
• And, most importantly:
• How does it actually perform on your recordings?

The JTC recommends precisely that kind of scrutiny.

Courts should test transcription systems using representative local courtroom recordings rather than relying on “vendor claims or generic performance metrics.”

That's a sentence worth remembering.

A carefully prepared demonstration recording is one thing.

A Tuesday morning docket with six speakers, an interpreter, overlapping testimony, rustling papers, somebody sitting too far from the microphone, and an HVAC system that has apparently decided to join the proceeding is another.

Test the latter.

Accuracy Is Not One Number

Another trap is the temptation to reduce transcription performance to a single impressive percentage.

“95% accurate.”

“98% accurate.”

“Industry-leading accuracy.”

Those numbers may sound reassuring, but courts should ask what they actually represent.

The JTC recommends evaluating not just word-level accuracy but material-error rates, correction burden, turnaround time, speaker identification, and failure points in challenging proceedings.

That is much closer to the question courts really need answered.

An incorrect article or conjunction may be annoying.

An incorrect name, dollar amount, date, legal term, speaker attribution, or critical word in testimony can be something very different.

And the bulletin explicitly identifies many of the environments where automated transcription can struggle: overlapping speech, accents and dialects, multilingual proceedings, interpreters, legal terminology, names, dates, numbers, rapid speech, and speaker attribution.

So rather than asking:

“What is your accuracy rate?”

Try asking:

“Show us where your system fails.”

That may be one of the most valuable questions in an STT evaluation.

The Real Value May Be Everything Around the Transcript

In practice, one of the most common ways Liberty customers use speech-to-text today is much simpler: search.

Rather than treating machine-generated text as the official record, courts use it as an index into the recording—searching for a name, phrase, or topic, then jumping back to the corresponding audio to verify what was actually said.

That workflow closely reflects the approach described in the JTC bulletin, which notes that AI-generated text can be used as a shortcut for locating information in the underlying recording and recommends verifying relevant content against the source audio.

And importantly, Liberty does not resell or mark up the speech-to-text service itself.

Today, a court with an Azure account, Liberty Post Recording Manager, and existing recordings can begin batch-processing those files through Azure Speech Services directly. Liberty provides the workflow and integration; the court maintains its own relationship with the transcription provider.

[Learn how to configure speech-to-text in Liberty Post Recording Manager →]

At current Azure pricing (October 2026), that can be approximately $0.18 per processed hour of audio, depending on the service and configuration.

For many courts, that means the value proposition is not “buy our AI.” It is simply: make the recordings you already have dramatically easier to find and use.

This is also why we believe speech-to-text itself will increasingly become a commodity.

The differentiator isn't simply whether software can turn audio into words, the more important questions are what happens next.

• Can a user click into the transcript and hear the corresponding audio?
• Can the system identify speakers based on isolated recording channels?
• Can judges and staff search an entire proceeding?
• Can access be controlled?
• Can confidential proceedings be protected?
• Can retention requirements be honored?
• Can the system integrate into existing court workflows?
• Can the court export its own data?
• Can a better transcription engine be adopted later without replacing the entire recording infrastructure?

Interestingly, the JTC procurement recommendations focus heavily on exactly these surrounding capabilities: synchronized transcript and recording playback, speaker/channel identification, search, audit logs, confidentiality controls, data ownership, retention, security, and protections against vendor lock-in.

That is where we believe courts should concentrate their attention.

AI Transcription Shouldn't Be Scary

None of this means courts should avoid speech-to-text.

Quite the opposite.

AI-assisted transcription has enormous potential to make recorded proceedings easier to search, faster to review, more accessible, and more useful. The JTC describes growing—but appropriately cautious—experimentation across courts and related adjudicative organizations.

At Liberty, we're excited about that future!

We just think courts should be allowed to see the technology for what it is.

Speech-to-text is a tool.

A rapidly improving one.

And increasingly, a widely available one.

That belief also shaped Liberty’s approach to the results themselves. Most courts already have Microsoft Word, so they shouldn’t need a proprietary or cloud-based text editor just to review or search speech-to-text output. As shown in the screenshot above, Liberty can generate standard RTF files that open directly in Word, helping keep the workflow familiar, local, searchable, and simple.

So, this spooky season, don't be frightened by AI. Be wary of the smoke machine.

Ask what is actually powering the system—and what value the vendor is adding around it.

• Test it against your own proceedings.
• Understand where your data goes.
• Measure the errors that matter.
• Require human review where the stakes demand it.

And when someone tells you their transcription technology is unlike anything else on the market?

Maybe ask them to turn the lights on.