Solutions to digital courtroom recording

Over the last fifteen years there has been a gradual move to digital recording solutions to reduce costs and improve functionality.

DART (Digital Audio Recording and Transcription) allows for:

• Central storage for simple access
• Powerful search for quick retrieval
• Reduced maintenance and media costs
• No loss of quality and easy distribution
• Centralised management of recorders
• Single system for synchronised audio and video
• Live monitoring from outside the room
• Replay whilst still recording
• Quicker transcription time
• Secure integrated workflow management

There is now an urgent need to move away from analogue tape recording due to the unavailability of the tapes themselves and spare parts for the recorders.

Digital recording is now a mature technology for court recording with respect to:

• Audio recording
• Lip-synchronised video recording
• Integrated courtroom workflow management

This white paper explains the benefits of upgrading to a digital solution for courtroom recording, the costs savings that it can bring and the important factors you should consider.

Audience

This white paper is relevant to:

• Those responsible for the operation of the courtroom recording system (and any associated network)
• Those responsible for budgeting for the recording system
• Those responsible for setting the requirements for logistic management
• Transcriptionists
• Those responsible for transcriptions

Locate vital information automatically

The ability to record audio channels digitally is now well established in situations such as:

• Courtrooms
• Air traffic control communications
• Lawful Intercept by Law Enforcement Agencies
• Police and Immigration interviews
• Emergency Services command and control position
• Surveillance by Law Enforcement Agencies

With the ever increasing communications and the rapid development of digital recording technology and decreasing costs of mass storage huge quantities of data from a variety of sources are being recorded.

The result is that most organisations do not have sufficient manual resource to analyse the recorded data and may be missing vital information and intelligence. Best in class audio analytic tools allow rapid identification of important information that may be buried within thousands of hours of these recordings. Whether you are searching for a word, a phrase, a person or just trying to understand complex relationships audio analytics can greatly enhance your operational capability and save significant costs. However these technologies only produce effective results in certain scenarios.

This paper reviews when various data mining technologies such as key word spotting, text to speech, speaker ID, language ID, should be used to achieve the best results. The paper also discusses practical ways in which Supervisors and Managers can use this knowledge to maximise manual and automated resources.

Audience

This white paper is relevant to:

• Analysts
• Managers
• Supervisors

In particular it is relevant to those responsible for recording solutions and whose budgets are weighed down by the labour costs of trawling through thousands of hours of recordings.

Mass Storage: Ongoing integration of voice and data prompts renewed emphasis on storage infrastructure

With the ongoing integration of phone call recording into the wider field of voice and data services, the telecomms industry is being forced to rethink its network infrastructure and technology resources. A major element of this infrastructure is data storage. Whether a RAID array, internet enabled NAS, SAN, or emerging archive media such as Blu-ray, the economies of scale to be achieved are considerable.

Whole industries wish to minimise administration and cost associated with legacy storage solutions, whilst legal requirements within certain industry sectors also mean that voice recording information and associated data files must be kept for a minimum number of days or years…