Events surrounding racial injustice in the US, and broader discussions on racial equality globally, have greatly impacted us in the UK and the communities in which we live.
Intelligent Voice is proud to support Relativity’s vision of a world where social justice and racial equity are strengthened by one’s ability to access the resources necessary to discover the truth, as a Relativity Justice for Change program partner. Intelligent Voice provide software and services on a pro bono basis to participating service providers, law firms and non-profits for body worn video, emergency calls, interview and interrogation recordings and prison phone calls.
“We’ve been lucky to have champions like Intelligent Voice join the Justice for Change program.”
Underpinned by the belief that discovering truth is fundamental to the creation of a more just world, Relativity created their Justice for Change program to leverage the unique capabilities of both Relativity and its ecosystem to positively impact racial and social justice.
The Justice for Change program vision is to create a world where social justice and racial equity are strengthened by one’s ability to access the resources necessary to discover the truth.
Justice for Change projects approved by Relativity can use up to 500 Gigabytes of data in RelativityOne, for up to 24 months, at no cost. Whilst allowing up to up to half a Terabyte of audio / video to be stored, played and reviewed, speech to text indexing and associated analytic and redaction capabilities were not initially available.
“Some of the Justice for Change nonprofit partners were trying to manually transcribe calls and videos themselves, or leverage another third-party group to help,” says Jaclyn Sattler, Senior Associate for Strategy and Business Operations at Relativity.
Enter London-based Intelligent Voice Limited, for whom events surrounding racial injustice in the US have impacted their team members in the UK and the communities in which they live.
“Coming from the BAME community myself, I applaud Relativity’s initiative to set up this program. If this program can help to create a more equal society, we are delighted and privileged for the opportunity to play our part”
Having initially been contacted by an eDiscovery Services provider in the US who were looking to utilize the existing free trial of Intelligent Voice in RelativityOne as part of their Justice for Change case, Intelligent Voice are now partnered with Justice for Change to provide audio and video analysis capabilities for free to all program participants. This can and does run to orders of magnitude beyond the standard amount of free audio / video available in RelativityOne for a new Intelligent Voice partner.
“Now that Intelligent Voice has teamed up with Justice for Change, we are able to offer top-tier transcription support that can be easily supported in RelativityOne” says Sattler. “Ultimately, this allows Justice for Change nonprofit partners to organize their data and discover the truth much faster”.
Interrogation recordings can present a particular challenge, due to the repetitive nature of questioning both within and across recordings for a detainee, some two or three hours at a time, and running to a dozen or more hours in total.
The patented Intelligent Voice proprietary algorithm deployed within RelativityOne provides a navigable Executive Summary of interesting things said as a sidebar in the media player, enabling repetitive topics raised to be quickly identified and sequentially reviewed. This includes potential blind spots and unknown unknowns not specified for a Search Term Report.
“Nonprofits are amazed when they hear about the AI capabilities from Intelligent Voice that can be applied to their discovery process” says Colleen Costello, Head of Social Impact at Relativity. “It’s been beneficial to have their expertise and software added to social justice cases.”
For attorneys working on a pro-bono basis, having to dip in and out of recordings as they revert from their pro-bono work to their billable caseload and then back again can be challenging. The executive summary provided by the Intelligent Voice tags helps to mitigates, enabling an overall sense of the interaction to be quickly obtained and retained. The navigable summary also reduces variation in interpretation of a recording for a given pro-bono reviewer from a Tuesday morning to a Thursday evening to a Sunday afternoon.
For more recent cases, the intelligibility of what may or may not have been said on Body Worn Video can be a particular challenge, especially for contested interactions with a lone camera recording. Within the Intelligent Voice Player in RelativityOne, words are suggested for what might otherwise be unintelligible portions of speech, not just from the karaoke play-along through the displayed transcribed index, but also the optional sub & sur-titling of additional suggestions, along with the ability to listen to the playback slower than real-time. As Sattler says “Intelligent Voice software’s ability to transcribe calls and videos will be invaluable to so many of these cases”.
Adding jail house calls into the mix can take the hours of recordings to review from the dozens to the thousands, often across many years and without much of anything to go on by way of metadata. Intelligent Voice’s expertise in prison telephony were recognized in New Scientist over five years ago, and is one area where its proprietary GPU-acceleration of speech to text can come into its own. Thousands of hours of recordings can be turned around in time for the following day, in effect running in parallel with discussions on how to conduct the review, what to have on the coding panel, and so forth. “Nonprofits are amazed how quickly the results can be ready for analysis” says Costello.
“We are so proud to support the Relativity Justice for Change program,” says Nigel Cannings, CTO of Intelligent Voice, who qualified as a solicitor (UK attorney) in 1993. “People don’t realize the volume of audio and video evidence there is out there (interviews, bodycams, prison phone calls, emergency calls), and reviewing this manually is incredibly time-consuming and expensive: And, as it turns out, incredibly prohibitive. Our team has already been hard at work providing real help in real cases to real people using the Intelligent Voice system, and we look forward to continuing to support this initiative to help the wrongly convicted. This is the type of thing I became a lawyer for.”
“Intelligent Voice’s software utilized through RelativityOne will help power the pursuit of justice in matters where the volume of audio and video evidence seems unbearable” says Johnathan Hill, Community Engagement Lead at Relativity. “We are thrilled to have Intelligent Voice join the Justice for Change program.”
“Intelligent Voice’s software utilized through RelativityOne will help power the pursuit of justice in matters where the volume of audio and video evidence seems unbearable. We are thrilled to have Intelligent Voice join the Justice for Change program.”
Whether it is body worn video, interview room or interrogation recordings, or post-incarceration call recordings, Intelligent Voice are empowering the e-discovery community to tackle the most important issues by providing voice technology to the organizations fighting for justice that need it most. Helping make our world a more just and equitable place to live.
