The Marshall Project

In Court, Where Are Siri and Alexa?

When it comes to setting the record straight, court reporting technology is still not up to speed.

Court reporters turn out millions of transcripts a year documenting what’s said in legal proceedings. But in the high-tech age of Siri and Alexa, why aren’t courts turning to technology to produce the records in real time?

That’s one of the questions that has been raised after a new study found court reporters in couldn’t accurately transcribe the speech of some African Americans, instead producing records that were “ungrammatical and nonsensical.” The study, set to be published in the journal Language, found that witnesses who speak in cultural or regional dialects are more likely to be misunderstood in the courts.

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