The
Voice Writing Method of Court
Reporting
History of Court Reporting
The profession of court reporting is thousands of years old; its roots
can be traced back to 63 B.C., when Marcus Tullius Tiro employed
shorthand reporting as Cicero's secretary. It requires high skill,
accuracy and a broad range of learning; no wonder it has been a
traditionally high-paying job. Skilled court reporters remain in big
demand across the United States.
THE
PROCESS
In the courtroom, deposition suite, or even classroom, a speaker
speaks, sending sound waves into the air. The reporter determines what
words the incoming sound waves represent, then physically reproduces
the words, transmitting them into a magnetic media file usually on a
floppy drive or hard disk. From this magnetic media file, the court
reporter produces an official transcript of the speaker's words. This
same process is used by today's machine shorthand reporters and voice
reporters.
WRITING
AUTOMATED
Until the late 19th century, a quill or pen was the primary means of
court reporting. John R. Gregg, creator of the most widely used
pen-writing method of shorthand in the United States, eventually opened
a school in Chicago. But in the late 1870s, automation was introduced
in the form of Miles Bartholomew's first stenotype machine. The concept
was simple: take advantage of a person's ability to type faster than he
or she can write. At about the same time, Alexander Graham Bell wanted
a machine to be able to understand voices, and he worked on his
photoautograph. That research led him to create his telephone. By the
1940s, use of the specialized typewriting machine had supplanted the
pen, primarily due to the increased speed with which a court reporter
could "take it down." Indeed, Ward S. Ireland's first publicly
available Stenotype machine enabled inexperienced operators to attain
and even break speed championship records. Clearly seeing the
inevitable, the national organization redefined the term "shorthand" to
include typing the specialized word abbreviations on the new machine.
Thus "machine shorthand" was born, and the machine, itself, would later
be referred to as a "writer." This was perfectly in keeping with their
founding fathers' edict, pronounced at the National Shorthand Reporters
Association's first meeting in Chicago in 1899: "No stenographic creed
is to be especially honored or recognized; the rituals of all systems
are to have equal force and control."
VOICE
WRITING
The field wasn't giving up on Bell's high-tech vision. Also in the
1940s, Horace Webb, a pen-writing stenographer, imagined yet a faster
way of taking down the record while working as a court reporter in
Chicago. He inserted a small microphone first into a cigar box, which
was connected to a standard recorder, and then into a coffee can filled
with a speech-silencing "tortuous path" to dampen reverberating sound
waves. The theory proved correct, as the next mask was remarkably quiet
and made an adequate recording. The concept was again, simple: take
advantage of a person's ability to speak faster than he or she can type
-er, write. The court reporter places a stenomask to his or her face,
and by speaking, repeats the words spoken by persons in the courtroom
into a recorder attached to the stenomask. To produce a transcript, the
reporter simply plays back the recording in the usual method of
transcription. Constant improvements yielded today's Stenomask and
variants, which look similar to masks worn by fighter pilots.
ENTER
VOICE RECOGNITION
The wheels set in motion in the late 1800s and 1940s have today yielded
the ultimate synergy of human-to-machine interaction as applied to the
process of producing a written record: the voice recognition computer
assisted transcription system. These so-called VR CAT systems, in
tandem with ScanSoft's Dragon Naturally Speaking or IBM's ViaVoice
programs, can perform speech-to-text translation in realtime with a
sustained accuracy of 96 percent. The National Verbatim Reporters
Association's Realtime Verbatim Reporter certification is awarded to
those reporters who achieve a minimum of 96% accuracy while taking down
a five-minute test dictation between 180 and 200 words per minute.
Today's VR CAT-based television captioners can achieve 99% accuracy
with IBM's ViaVoice.
The court reporting industry has adopted many technological changes in
the last sixty years. Most of that credit belongs to a handful of
innovating pioneers, as well as the profession's founding fathers, who
in 1899 had the foresight to anticipate and embrace new approaches to
mastering this specialized skill. Using cutting edge technology in
human-to-machine realtime interaction, reporters can upgrade the
services they offer their existing clients, or they may enter the newly
opened areas of broadcast captioning, realtime in the classroom or for
the hearing impaired, and reporting on the Internet. The National
Verbatim Reporters Association, by fully embracing voice recognition
technology, will ensure a place for the next millennium's scribe.