The Upper-Valais based SME recapp IT, specialising in multilingual automatic speech recognition, developed vorscriba, a tool that enables the automatic transcript of hearings into text, facilitating the documentation of legal procedures. Several Swiss judicial institutions deployed this solution, which responds to legal norms and is based on the power of artificial intelligence (AI). An international expansion is underway.
“We have launched vorscriba because we noticed a growing interest in the legal field. The new Swiss Criminal Procedure Code, which came into effect at the beginning of 2024, was the triggering factor of this product launch”, explains David Imseng, founder of recapp IT, based in Visp. This new tool is a development of töggl, recapp IT’s standard tool, but it presents an adaptation to justice needs. The user interface and AI algorithm have been adapted to justice needs, in the scope of a pilot project with the public ministry of the canton of Bern.
Transcript in each national language
The solution is equipped with high-quality vocal recognition, allowing a precise transcript in each national language and dialect. During hearings, it automatically differentiates the people speaking and identifies the spoken language. To guarantee an optimal protection of sensitive data, vorscriba is directly installed on the client’s infrastructure, ensuring that the information does not leave the internal network.
Notably thanks to AI, vorscriba does not only transcribe pronounced words. The tool also integrates the appropriate punctuation and respects uppercase and lowercase rules, improving the transcripts’ readability. It also generates summaries and can translate, when needed, foreign languages into one of the national languages. Vorscriba’s duration of automatic processing is equivalent to the hearing, which guarantees optimal efficiency.
Important time savings for judicial authorities
“The Swiss Criminal Procedure Code allows significant deviations from the traditional rules governing the recording of interrogations when technical recording methods are used”, David Imseng says. Audio recordings of legal hearings offer many advantages but present one drawback: post-processing. “It takes between 8 to 12 minutes of work to process one minute of audio. Thanks to our solution, the processing time can be reduced to between one to three minutes per minute of audio.”
Presentation in Germany
Recapp IT recently went to the international Symposium on new technologies in Fürstenfeldbruck (Germany) to present vorscriba. “Our pioneering software won the heart of several German and Austrian representatives. Abroad, it receives a warm welcome, and international expansion seems only logical.” Watch this space.
