Aggressive Marketing — Growth or Flailing?

During our Court Reporting & Captioning Week 2021 there were a couple of press releases and some press releases dressed up as journalism all about digital recording, automatic speech recognition, and its accuracy and viability. There’s actually a lesson to be learned from businesses that continually promise without any regard for reality, so that’s what I’ll focus on today. I’ll start with this statement. We have a big, vibrant field of students and professionals where everyone that is actually involved in it, from the smallest one-woman reporting armies to the corporate giants, says technology will not replace the stenographic court reporter. Then we have the tech players who continuously talk about how their tech is 99 percent accurate, but can’t be bothered to sell it to us, and whose brilliant plan is to record and transcribe the testimony, something stenographers figured out how to do decades ago.

Steno students are out there getting a million views and worldwide audiences…
And Chris Day? He’s posting memes on the internet.

You know the formula. First we’ll compare this to an exaggerated event outside the industry, and then we’ll tie it right into our world. So let’s breeze briefly over Fyre Festival. To put it in very simple terms, Fyre Festival was an event where the CEO overpromised, underdelivered, and played “hide the ball” until the bitter end. Customers were lied to. Investors were lied to. Staff and construction members were lied to. It was a corporate fiasco propped up by disinformation, investor money, and cash flow games that ended with the CEO in prison and a whole lot of people owed a whole lot of money that they will, in all likelihood, never get paid. It was the story of a relative newcomer to the industry of music festivals saying they’d do it bigger and better. Sound familiar?

As for relative newcomers in the legal transcription or court reporting business, take your pick. Even ones that have been incorporated for a couple of decades really aren’t that impressive when you start holding up the magnifying glass. Take, for example, VIQ Solutions and its many subsidiaries:

I promise to explain if you promise to keep reading.

VIQ apparently trades OTC so it gives us a rare glimpse of financial information that we don’t get with a lot of private companies. Right off the bat, we can see some interesting stuff. $8 million in revenue with a negative net income and a positive cash flow. Positive cash flow means the money they have on hand is going up. Negative income means the company is losing money. How does a company lose money but continue to have cash on hand grow? Creditors and investors. When you see money coming in while the company is taking losses, it generally means that the company is borrowing the money or getting more cash from investors/shareholders. A company can continue on this way for as long as money keeps coming in. Companies can also use tricks similar to price dumping, and charge one client or project an excessive amount in order to fund losses on other projects. The amazing thing is that most companies won’t light up the same way Fyre did, they’ll just declare bankruptcy and move on. There’s not going to be a big “gotcha” parade or reckoning where anyone admits that stenographic court reporting is by far the superior business model.

This is juxtaposed against a situation where, for the individual stenographic reporter, you’re kind of stuck making whatever you make. If things go badly, bankruptcy is an option, but there’s never really an option to borrow money or receive investor money for decades while you figure it out. Seeing all these ostensible giants enter the field can be a bit intimidating or confusing. But any time you see these staggering tech reveals wrapped up in a paid-for press release, I urge you to remember Fyre, remember VIQ, and remember that no matter what that revenue or cash flow looks like, you may not have access to the information that would tell you how the company is really doing.

This also leads to a very bright future for steno entrepreneurs. As we learn the game, we can pass it along to each other. When Stenovate landed its first big investor, I talked about that. Court reporting and its attached services, in the way we know them and love them, are an extremely stable, winning investment. Think about it. Many of us, when we begin down this road, spend up to $2,000 on a student machine and up to $9,000 on a professional machine and software. That $11,000 sinkhole, coupled with student loan debt, grows into stable, positive income. So what’s stopping any stenographic court reporting firm from getting out there and educating investors on our field? The time and drive to do it. Maybe for some people, they just haven’t had that idea yet. But that’s where we’re headed. I have little doubt that if we compete, we will win. But we have to get people in that mindset. So if you know somebody with that entrepreneurial spirit, maybe pass them this post and get them thinking about whether they’d like to seek investors to grow their firm and reach. Business 101 is that a dollar today is more valuable than a dollar tomorrow. That means our field can be extremely attractive to value investors and be a safe haven from the gambling money being supplied to “tech’s” habitual promisors.

Know a great reporting or captioning firm that needs a spotlight? Feel free to write me or comment about them below. I’ll start us off. Steno Captions, LLC launched off recently without doing the investor dance. That’s the kind of promise this field has. I wish them a lot of luck and success in managing clients and training writers.

How To Spot More Better Marketing

Count out how many times in your life you’ve seen a product in advertising that was similar to something you already do, have, or want. Did the advertiser tell you it would do more stuff? Did the advertiser tell you it was better at doing stuff than its competitors? Did the advertiser try to make you feel good and confident about a purchase in this product? February of last year, I touched on the magic of marketing. Today, we explore marketing that takes aim at us, how to identify it, and how to tell our students not to be swayed by it.

The genesis of this post is actually a marketing blitz by Transcription Outsourcing, LLC. Their ad boldly starts off “Tired of waiting for your court reporter?” They claim their prices are “up to” 50 percent less expensive than a court reporter. Guaranteed accuracy, 3 to 5 day turnaround. Among their many claims are reporters won’t format your documents, send back errors, have overseas teams that are hard to contact, take weeks. For most of us in the business, this is laughable, but we have to take ourselves out of our skin and hop into the skin of a potential client or a stenography student that has zero experience in sitting at a stenotype or desk transcribing legal proceedings. As far as identifying and helping students identify “more better marketing” I’d propose watching out for four red flags:

It’s cheaper than you.
It’s faster than you.
You still have a job.
It promises.

One, if it’s cheaper, why isn’t everybody using it? For this, you can look into your own life experience. Why don’t you buy cheaper food or a less expensive product? Usually doing something cheaper means sacrificing quality or training somewhere in the process. Two, if it’s faster, again, why isn’t everybody on it? Are there problems scaling the product, does the service provider not deliver, or are the costs of being faster too high? Three, you still have a job? Look, Company XYZ says they’re cheaper, faster, better, more better, amazing, and yet the clients are still using stenographic court reporters. This is not to say these types of services could not, through their marketing, supplant reporters. But flag three is all about acknowledging that at least some what they’re selling is hype and hope to customers. Four, it promises. That’s probably the biggest red flag you can get in this type of marketing. We saw it with Theranos, Project Natal, Solar Roadways, Waterseer, Hyperloop. People love to sell things whether they’re possible or not. They promise their solution is the solution. Theranos was going to test extraordinarily small amounts of blood and administer treatments through patches. It had a $9 billion valuation. Didn’t exist. Project Natal and Milo were going to revolutionize gaming. There were videos advertising it! Didn’t exist. Solar Roadways was going to solve America’s energy crisis by throwing out everything we know about efficient solar power generation. It raised millions of dollars. Didn’t work. Waterseer was going to solve the world’s water crisis and forgot to mention that dehumidifiers have the same basic function. The Hyperloop routinely ignores that a single break in the loop or tunnel could implode the entire thing and kill everyone in it. Promises are part of human interaction, but buying into them without reservation is dangerous and expensive. If it promises but doesn’t deliver, take note.

That’s identification in a nutshell. And at this point many are probably saying, “Chris, you’re just picking on these guys because they’re taking a swipe at court reporting. You don’t actually have anything that shows their promises aren’t the real deal!” This is where experience as a court reporter comes in. Take a look, again, at the things they said about court reporters.

They won’t format your documents. Well, in some jurisdictions, we have a prescribed transcript format. Even here in New York City, where there’s virtually no such mandate for freelancers, I know many freelancers who do or have worked for agencies that work with the New York City Law Department or MTA, and both like transcripts formatted a certain way by contract. Bottom line is if you can’t find a court reporter that’ll format your document, it’s either not proper in your jurisdiction or there’s some other stenographic court reporting company that will do it.
They send you back errors. I consider myself an extremely average reporter. I’m so average it took me ten years to finish off my RPR. In that ten years, I can recall exactly once that an error so egregious made its way in that it needed to be corrected and was serious. Humans make errors. News articles make errors every day. I’ve hired a lawyer that made an error. Guess what happens? It gets corrected. The world keeps turning. But, these people guarantee accuracy. I’m sure that means if a client find an error, they get the whole transcription for free, right? Right?! It promises, but there’s nothing really backing that promise. Students, ask your mentor how many mistakes they’ve made in their career. Ask them how many were serious. Mistakes are a non-issue in the context of a larger career if you learn from them.
Their overseas teams are hard to contact. With the majority of court reporting firms I know and have worked with being US-based or having US-based management, I find this an odd claim. Even Israel-based Verbit, to the extent you can consider them court reporters, never came off as particularly hard to contact. Even the smallest firms I’ve ever worked with have a dialing service that makes sure the customer can get in touch with someone or leave questions or comments for the owner.
They aren’t secure. I’ve found the word security to be kind of a red herring in our business. What kind of security are we talking about? SSL Certificates? Haven’t seen a reporting firm without them. Secure repositories? If you spend about sixty seconds Googling reporting firms, you’ll find security. It’s a comfort word at this point.
They take weeks. Six-hour service is available. Interesting. I wonder if Transcription Outsourcing provides six-hour service on eight-hour depositions like many of my colleagues do with their dailies and their immediates. For those not in the business, for a reasonable cost, a properly trained and skilled stenographic reporter can work with their team or scopist to deliver a transcript immediately at the conclusion of a deposition. I am sure that once time travel is developed, court reporters will be the pioneers in producing transcripts before proceedings actually occur, too.

The point is to look at the millions and millions of dollars that have went into ideas that had little chance of succeeding. Look how long it takes to verify that these ideas are scams or false hope. How many people do you think are fact checking transcription and court reporting companies? Even this idea that the service is cheaper is knocked right out of reality by their own rates. Between $1.50 and $5.00 per minute. When I was in the business of freelance court reporting and transcribed audio, I charged somewhere in the realm of $100 an hour, which is about $1.67 a minute. If you take their best rate, by their own advertising, they’re at best 10 percent cheaper. They had no problem making that 10 into a 50 in their advertising. Looking at some of their other rates, you can save yourself 30 percent by switching to steno. If any of this “better, cheaper” stuff was true, why would reporters use scopists? Sorry scopists. We can just send our work into Transcription Outsourcing, LLC, take our 30 percent, and let them do all the work. Doesn’t happen. They don’t care about burning an entire bridge of potential customers because there’s no savings to be had there. They want what our clients are paying today in their pockets, and they’re hoping lawyers fall for it.

The bottom line is we’re going to be seeing more and more puffery and opinion enter our field masquerading as fact. We will be inundated with it. It’s much easier to make up falsehoods or questionable claims than it is to fact check those same claims. So when you see, for example, Protect Your Record Project fighting to raise awareness about our services, it’s a win. When you see state associations fighting to raise awareness about our services, it’s a win. When you see professionals donating their time to help encourage students and mentoring new reporters, it’s a win. When you see Open Steno, NCRA, and Project Steno advertising this field and ways to get in, it’s a win. Our strength is that there are thousands of us in the field practicing today, and so one minute from each of us amounts to a lot more time and effort than companies can spend on making up BS. Keep taking advantage of that and working together to educate. Keep hitting up social media platforms and making sure people aren’t misled about who we are and what we do. The last ten years have built an impressive online community of reporters. The next ten will be a test of getting that community’s knowledge out to clients and potential stenographers.

What Verbit Investors Need To Know

I had touched pretty gently on Verbit when its series A funding came in at $23 million. The series B funding is in at about $31 million earlier this year. Now Verbit’s announced a strategic partnership with the STI and professional flip flopper, Jim Cudahy. Migliore & Associates already came out with the hard truth of what this means: ASR doesn’t make the cut for the production of legal transcripts without a qualified court reporter no matter what you name it, NLP, ASR, AI, computer magic, automated transcription.

Do I come off as angry? I am angry. I’m angry that investors are being led down a path of burning capital where there’s just not a bright future. When the series A funding was happening, Verbit used words like automated, “save an enormous amount of manual labor.” “Adaptive speech recognition” with over 99 percent accuracy. Series B is out. They “would not take the human transcriber out,” “the AI will enhance the human.” So investors are fundamentally paying millions of dollars so that they can be another Rev. I doubt very much that that’s what was sold to investors. I don’t think anybody would be putting down millions on that.

Then the partnership with STI? A complete joke. I have already gone into how, without any doubt, stenographers and NCRA are by far the best equipped to deal with the court reporter shortage. AAERT and the STI just don’t have the funding, infrastructure, or experience to tackle the problem, and it shows in their data. By their estimates, court reporting companies stand to save $250,000 over the next decade by adopting digital tools. First, I would love to know if this is individual savings or cumulative. We don’t know because there are no sources linked or cited. If this is cumulative, it’s embarrassing that they would even post that. That would mean 25,000 in savings a year across all companies. If that’s the projected individual savings per company, only slightly less embarrassing. That’s less than the average annual salary of a single court reporter. This may come as a shock to Jim Cudahy, but court reporting companies adopted digital tools throughout digital’s birth in the 70s and into the 80s and 90s. Stenographers are already a part of the Information Age, utilize AI, and produce quality records daily. The idea that investors are going to dump $50 million into “technology” expected to save $250,000 over 10 years and expect a return is terrifying. “Most courts are digital,” again, assuming everything they have to say is true, and yet judicial candidates show a preference for stenographic court reporters and returning them to courtrooms. The growth here is in stenographers, stenography jobs, and stenography schools, and Verbit’s current leadership is missing this boat completely.

Let’s just tell it like it is. When a grassroots-funded stenography blog can give you some pretty solid reasons you’re backing the wrong horse, it’s time to give investors nothing less than what they deserve. Open up a Steno Department, throw down some money on us, and we will make sure you’ve got real and steady returns. Verbit, with proper leadership from Tom Livne, can still save the day. Just not with this bait and switch technology-to-transcription model that amounts to little more than a repackaging of old tech. The only other viable alternative I see is buying this blog for a good $8 million and hoping investors don’t see it before then. Not a difficult decision. Come on over to the winning team. Vote for sten!

Buying Hype

Seems like every day now there’s a new article talking about the great advances of AI transcription. Notice in what I just linked, the author is “Wire Contributor,” which to me means that it’s probably a Trint employee. The September 2019 article goes on to link an April 2017 article where the Wire apparently said something they did was unprecedented.

If you’re not looking at dates and glancing over it, it looks like AI transcription is making leaps and bounds. It’s coming. Their app is to be released at the end of 2019! What will we do? I am here to hopefully get everyone thinking critically. Why are these articles always sporting a technology that’s critically acclaimed but not ready to be publicly released? Because it’s a pitch. It’s an effort to get more investors. It’s a bid to get more people to throw money at it.

Not to get too controversial, but I’ve long watched a YouTuber scientist named ThunderF00t (Phil Mason). He’s made many videos to raise consumer awareness on products including inventions like the Free Electric, Solar Roadways, Zero Breeze, Fontus. All of these amazing things have a common theme: They sound cool. The media doesn’t understand the concepts behind them. Their creators make positive claims about them. These inventions have had millions of dollars put into them only for kickstarters and stakeholders to be let down. This is despite walls of positive press from various sites and media forums.

What can we learn? Sellers sell. That’s what they do. When there’s millions of dollars to be made, does the seller really care if the product only meets 90, 80, or 70 percent of the buyer’s needs? Will most buyers spend more time and money holding the seller accountable, or will they eat the loss or attempt to justify the purchase to themselves? That’s why you see claim after claim and never a bad word unless you have colossal levels of fraud, like Theranos. What else can we learn? These things can raise millions of dollars and never hurt a market, Solar Roadways raised over a million dollars and never threatened existing energy companies.

Buying hype can only serve to dampen our morale and make us cede market share. It can only serve to silence us. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to investigate claims about computer science. Let’s start selling facts and raising consumer awareness. If nothing else, remember: If their product worked, you would be using it.

The Resurgence

It was looking pretty bad for steno for a while. Schools were closing. Courts were pushing stenographers out. Easy example, a few decades ago, stenographers started getting pushed out of New Jersey courts. The wheels of progress and the winds of change are slow, but I was fortunate enough to see this spot for a stenographic reporter pop up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. This is evidence to me that we can recover lost ground.

And there is certainly ground to recover. The Workers Compensation Board of New York moved to recording and having their stenographers transcribe. Our NYSCRA and others pushed to have the legislature mandate use of stenographic reporting, and the bill to do so was passed by the assembly and senate, but vetoed by Governor Cuomo. Needless to say, whenever New York decides to elect a new governor, it will be time for us to try again.

But seeing such a push by stenographers everywhere to educate the public and continue training each other to provide the best quality records possible, there’s no doubt in my mind that we can continue to take back any areas of the market that were lost.

I’ve gone over the math many times. There are more of us and so many ways to spread the message that stenography is still relevant and superior in this modern world. Old keyboard, new tricks. The best part of it is that as the push continues, people and companies are rising up to start new education programs. Just this year, by my own count, we’ve had something like a half a dozen programs open up and enrolling future stenographers.

The sweeter irony is that digital reporting very well may face the same shortage it tried to use against us. As word about stenography spreads, many transcribers are realizing that stenography can save them time and money in their transcription work, or that they can use stenography as a springboard into a career that is, on average, about double the pay. I’ve seen at least two social media posts in the last seven days about transcribers and digitals switching to steno. Let’s face it, anyone saying stenography is equal is running on intel that’s six years old. At that rate, they’ll catch on and get back on the wagon sometime in the next sixty. We can’t wait for them.

The truth is that from independent people like myself or Mirabai Knight, to major stenographic organizations like ASSCR or NCRA, to all the many consumers, judges, lawyers, stenographic court reporting has a lot of allies. It’s not going away. The New York State Court System said as much. We know the truth. All that’s left is to get out there, tell it, train our students to be the best they can be, and see the resurgence of stenography spread across the country.

Library of Congress Seeks Volunteer Transcribers

General announcement to anyone with a whole lot of free time and good will. The Library of Congress is seeking volunteer transcribers. I will probably take the time out to do at least one document and my fair share. It is a shame that they won’t or haven’t set aside a transcription budget for something so important, but for those that want to support this, it’s out there today.

Please note that signing up on a mobile phone is possible, but it seems their transcription is suited for a desktop or laptop.

Can Verbit Replace Verbatim?

I had had some thoughts with regard to AI and stenography. I stand by what I said there. Verbit has been, according to online commentators, soliciting people’s business and offering to assist with their workload. There are even some who have said — though I have not seen documentary proof of this — that Veritext is using Verbit or a similar process for their digital reporters. Succinctly, running the audio through a computer program and having a human fix up what the computer spits out. Oddly enough, sounds a lot like what we do when we are taking down every word on a stenotype these days.

The bottom line is these companies are hungry for money. They need revenue to prove to their investors that they are a good investment. Verbit reportedly raised $23 million. Trint reportedly raised at least 150 million euros, or 168 million dollars. That should give you an idea of just how big of an expense it is — in their estimation — to create a program to do what we already do.

When we talk about solving problems, and specifically solving problems with AI and computers, two of the largest jumps in technology are machine learning and modeling the human brain. Modeling the human brain seems an arduous task that is difficult to do on modern hardware. Machine learning is giving the computer training data, and then having the computer make “educated” guesses based on the training data.

So why bring this up again? Well, to caution all of us. The simple truth is the more training data that you give these folks, meaning the more audio files they have that show the computer what we do, the more they’ll be able to sculpt the program. If you make the business decision to help them in that way, that’s fine. But you know what? Demand a premium! There are hundreds of millions of dollars involved in developing these computer programs right now. They should probably be paying YOU to transcribe YOUR work, because quite frankly, if they perfect the program, you might be out of business. If they haven’t yet perfected the program, you’re helping them perfect it! Sounds like a premium service to me.

So make sure everybody out there knows: They don’t want your business, they need it, and they should probably be paying you.

To Our Litigators

RE: Stenographic Reporters

If you’re reading, I’m going to hope you’re the kind of lawyer that we all look up to. You’re responsive to clients, you’re honest with potential clients about what you can do for them, and you’re ready when it comes to filings, motions, discovery, or trial. Maybe you’re the one at your firm tailoring your service to your client’s budget, or maybe you oversee someone doing that for you. But the end is the same, giving the consumer the best value for the budget.

That’s what urges me to write today. There has been a lot said about “AI” transcription and digital recording versus stenographic reporting. There has been a lot said in my field about the Ducker Report and a forecasted shortage of court reporters. Some brave companies are turning to remote reporting, where legal, to allow a stenographer to appear remotely. Other courageous reporters are doubling their workload to meet your demand.

There is one solution that’s come out known as digital reporting. The main idea is that someone will record the proceedings, run it through a computer program, and then someone will fix up what the computer does. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is what we stenographers actually do. The major difference is we are stenographically recording (typing!) every word, and the computer is accepting that stenographic word and turning it into your English transcript.

The bottom line is: It simply ends up being more efficient to do it our way. One person, perhaps two, can stenographically record and transcribe an entire proceeding and have it to you that night or the next morning. For your dollar, there’s just not better value. Stenographers type four to five times faster than your average typist, so to finish the same proceeding, we are talking about four or five times the usual turnaround time for transcribers, or four or five times the staffing. Take the number of stenographers you have today, and multiply that number by 3, 4, or 5. If you think there’s a shortage and/or workflow issues now, imagine a world where you need five court reporters to put together your one proceeding. Imagine a world where the transcript is questioned and you need to bring those people in to testify instead of one stenographer.

Trust me when I say the firms switching to digital reporting or demanding you change your deposition notices to allow digital reporters are not saving you or your clients any money. Ever notice how there are almost never prices posted online for services? That’s because most of these companies act as middlemen. They make an agreement with you or the insurer, and then they make an agreement with us, the stenographers or transcribers, and they keep what’s in the middle. It’s really that simple. I would not be surprised, as a stenographer, to learn that I only made $3.25 a page on some of my old depositions with 25 cents per copy while the agency I worked with charged whatever they charged. 5? 6? 7? I don’t know. I only know that when I consulted a lawyer, the lawyer wanted almost 15 dollars a page if my case went to depositions.

I’ve been a stenographer for a long time, and I see two roads that you, the litigators, may take. You can let the sellers decide the market, and eventually stenographers won’t be an option, or you can make a sustained demand for a stenographic reporter at every dep. When lawyers start turning to direct market apps like Appear Me, Expedite Legal, and NexDep to get stenographers, those agencies pushing the digital and AI will jump on board and do whatever it takes to increase your supply of stenographers and get your business back.

Stenographers have been serving the legal community for decades. There’s been a push in recent years to do away with us because of a public perception that our methods are antiquated. Ironically, the people leading this charge are the companies we trusted with selling our services. So to our litigators: You now know all I know, and the customer is always right. Which will you choose?

A Word on AI and Stenography

I’ve said this before, but it feels like AI is ubiquitous and in everything these days. It spreads a lot of bad press for us stenographers in that people believe we are or will soon be replaceable. We can further extrapolate from the Pygmalion effect that those beliefs impact reality.

As many know, I’m an amateur programmer. I know relatively little about the top-of-the-line tech and can only code on a very basic level. That said, the more I learn conceptually, the more I’m in awe of just how far computers have come, and how far they have to go. You see it every day on your smartphone and in your steno software. Computers are hard at work and designed to do amazing things.

Here is the thing about computers: They only do what you tell them to do. You have to come up with a set of instructions, an algorithm, that gets it from point A to point B. They solve problems, but only using the instructions you give them. Even if you come up with the instructions, the results can be useless. We can imagine problems as mathematically solvable and insolvable — finite or infinite. An example of an infinite problem is a Fibonacci sequence. You take the next number in the sequence, and you add it to the last number in the sequence. This stretches into infinity. You can easily write a program to generate Fibonacci numbers, and the computer would die before generating them all because there are infinite numbers.

Then there are solvable problems. Chess is considered a solvable problem because it is a game with a finite number of pieces, spaces, and moves. There’s a problem, though. There are so many moves in chess that just the datasets for having 7 pieces at the end of the game (Lomonosov tablebases) are said to be 140 terabytes of information. To put that into perspective, it’s been estimated that all the books in the world would fit on about 60 terabytes. Even if you had a supercomputer capable of generating every possible move in Chess, the information would be absolutely useless to you, because to digest all of it would be the equivalent of reading every book ever written thousands of times.

So let’s think of AI and audio in terms of problem solving. The most basic way to describe Alexa and Siri is that they listen to you for keywords, and check what you say against their database, and decide what to do based on that algorithm we talked about. Let’s face it, there are only maybe 200,000 words in the English language. You could store every single one as a large audio file with less than 700 GB. Here is the deal: computers don’t hear in the traditional sense. They’re taking what you say and presenting educated guesses based on all the data they have. So now, if you will, imagine all 200,000 English language words and every combination they could possibly be in. To put it in perspective, it is a way bigger number than this. Now let’s add all the different ways words might be said, or all the different scenarios that might interfere with how the computer is “hearing.” Let’s add all the different accents and dialects of English.

Let me say this: It is very likely, in my mind, that someday computers will be programmed to hear as well as stenographers in any given situation. It’s a solvable problem. It’s a winnable game. But right now, based on what I know, there’s an indeterminate amount of time and money that it’ll take to get to a point where it is perfect and 95 percent or better in most or all scenarios in a reasonable amount of time. Take for a moment the example of Solar Roadways. Pave the roads in solar panels to solve America’s energy crisis. Millions of dollars were poured into this solution, and it failed. Remember, solvable problem, winnable game. Finite number of people with finite energy needs. Failed anyway. Speech-to-text is estimated to be worth billions of dollars. But what if it takes 100 more years to solve? How many millions or billions of dollars need to be lost before the solution is declared “good enough?” Remember, they can sell Alexa and Dragon today for piles of money. They don’t need 95 percent. The exponential growth of computers has ended, and unless the experts bring us quantum computing or some other huge leap in technology, we’re looking at computers being more money to upgrade.

Those companies you see that are touting transcription AI in 2019 are doubtlessly having transcribers fix AI-prepared transcripts at best. Their game is psychological. It’s not cost saving, it’s cost shifting from the worker to the boss. That’s why it’s not being sold to the public. It’s a magic trick. Look to the left while the magician rolls the coin to the right. It is in our best interest as stenographers to call this out when appropriate, and continue to bolster our own magic skills and industry as the go-to for the hearing impaired and legal communities. Could some geniuses come along and program your replacement next year? Sure. But one thing that you should understand is that it’s not very likely, and buying the hype before they have a product to sell is only going to hurt our morale and livelihoods. We have our method. We have a product. We’ve got more brains, voters, and history in the field. So do yourself and all of us a favor, don’t buy the hype, and the next time you meet a transcriber working for Fake AI Transcription Corp, LLC, tell them they can double their earnings and better themselves by joining the stenographic legion. If a supercomputer is required to solve Chess, what do you believe is required to get automatic speech recognition to 95 percent?

May 26, 2019 Edit:
I should add that it’s obvious computers are becoming ruthlessly good at transcribing one speaker, especially in a closed or suitable environment. There are hours of video on that. It’s introduction of multiple speakers in a less-than-perfect environment where the thing struggles, probably because of all those mathematical issues talked about above.

June 18, 2019 Edit:

A post recently made its rounds on social media claiming a computer science PhD couldn’t see the perfect transcription coming out any time soon. It stands in stark contrast to the claims of some that the technology is already perfect.

August 17, 2019 Edit:

Another article came to light showing that Facebook Messenger and other automatic transcription apps are actually using human transcribers behind the scenes. Using my amateur knowledge of computer coding, I can say this is clear evidence that they need data (the transcriptions) to feed into the machine learning algorithms. Further, if they’re not paying their transcribers exceptionally well and bad data is being inputted, it could ultimately make automatic transcription programs worse. Expect some pretty big delays on the AI transcription front.

August 25, 2019 Edit:

I had created a “mock voice recognition video” just to prove how easy it would be for a company to lie about its voice recognition progress. I coded a computer program that spits back whatever text you give it at a set words per minute. So next time you’re at an automatic transcription demonstration, ask yourself if what you’re seeing is automatic or staged. I often give the example of Project Natal and Peter Molyneux. Gamers were made to believe that the Milo demonstration of Project Natal was a showcase of technology that was coming out. The truth broke years later that the demonstration was heavily scripted, and over ten years later, no such technology exists. Similarly, when someone tells you that their audio transcription program is flawless — question whatever you’re seeing and realize how easy it is to stage and sell things.

Stenographers, US Legal Is Not Your Friend

As some quick background, I received an anonymous email that basically said “US Legal is shifting to ECR and having stenos train them, your mileage may vary but your days are numbered.” Hit up two of my favorite friends and mentors about it. One said, “they sent it to you because you blog everything, don’t give them any air time.” The other said, “look into it, verify whether or not it’s true, and there’s not much you can do about it.”

So anyway, I took the second option, and I surveyed some people using Google/Facebook, and like me, people had heard this before. A dear friend sent me a mailer that was received from US Legal CA. They want people to transcribe from home. Then I went looking on the careers page of the website and found their New York listing for Electronic Court Reporter. Probably because we are 1099s, there’s not the slightest mention of stenographic reporter.

But this inspires some critical thought. Why would a company push so hard for transcribers and electronic recorders? My opinion? They believe that the alternative methods are where the almighty dollar is. But they rely on us not speaking about it. They rely on us not sharing this message. They rely on us continuing to work with them using our infrastructure and experience that stenography has built over the last six decades. So I have an honest message to any stenographic reporter: Leave them in the dust. Don’t take the jobs, take the clients. It’s one thing if you want to work with us and pay us well. It’s another thing entirely to position yourself to do away with us. These aren’t your clients, they are our customer base, and we’re taking it back.

Consider too that these companies have shown the willingness and desire to not play by the rules. In a recent decision, Holly Moose v US Legal, US Legal argued that it should not be bound by state rules because it is in the business of connecting customers with independent contractors. The court said that this logic was unpersuasive at best.

Our ability to stay vibrant and the viability of this field rely on being visible and profitable. Nobody is going to educate stenographers if we’re making transcriber money. If a company offered you double your money this year but no more jobs after that ever from anyone, would you take it? That’s what we’re looking at on a grand scale the more we put our heads in the sand. Companies exist out of convenience to their investors. Reduce that margin, watch them pull out, and let the work flow naturally where it needs to: Stenographic court reporters.