I was given a message from Catuogno Reporting regarding their merge with Readback. They don’t like stenographers. I can tell because they’re so loud about it. Check out this image that appears on their website.
They talk a good game about technology and experts too. Check it out.
Let me break it down. Technology doesn’t just magically pop into existence and there’s no reason to believe they’ve invented better ASR than Microsoft or IBM, which are companies that do not have ASR suitable for court reporting. So, feeling quite confident, I wrote them an email. Enjoy.
“I was recently passed the announcement that your company is rolling Catuogno into itself and intending to create a new category of deposition services called active reporting. The idea that your company can provide faster transcripts consistently is preposterous. It’s already been well-settled by all available data that to match stenographic court reporters you need much larger teams of people or much more time to complete the work. Fluff aside, I can only assume your company intends to follow something like the Verbit model where QWERTY transcribers fix up automatic speech recognition, maybe with more techs or assistants to help, but at its core, it’s just what is done now with more people involved. This is not innovation, it is rebranding of services lawyers receive today. We can tell that by your mockery of the stenotype, the most advanced technology today in speech-to-text transcription. Only an abject moron would mock a thing because of its invention date. The piano was invented hundreds of years ago and yet somehow it is still used to make sweet, sweet music.
I understand that the way to become a leader in the market is to be first on a niche, but you have to understand that stenographic court reporting has been around a long time. There is no emerging niche and creating one artificially isn’t going to happen. Claiming that you have magically come up with something new is fooling no one. The companies that stick with steno will survive. If you have not been following my work on the Stenonymous blog, I suggest you start, because when I am done with it, this industry will be several times larger than it is today, the stenographers will be making companies that stand by them very rich, and competing fiercely with those that didn’t.
Get with the program. In the meantime this open letter will be posted to Stenonymous. Thanks.”