Supreme Court invites bids for Artificial Intelligence solutions to transcribe arguments and proceedings

The Supreme Court of India on Tuesday invited bids towards deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for transcription of oral arguments and court proceedings..A bid document released by the Court states that eligible companies have to be incorporated under the Companies Act or be a government entity with two years of proven experience in providing such systems either nationally or globally."The AI tool for transcription of arguments and court proceedings shall initially be deployed for the Constitution Bench matters and with passage of time extendable to all matters, subject to the approval and directions of the concerned Court.".Offering a glimpse into how the process will work, the bid document states,"The transcription of arguments generated through AI, machine learning and deep learning solution and tools must be proof-read by qualified transcribers as the first line and thereafter by reviewers, who must proofread the same and remove any typographical errors, mistakes before forwarding the final version transcription to the Registry. The Supreme Court intends to publish the AI generated transcription on its official website and to share the same with the concerned Advocates through electronic mode.".AI-generated transcriptions must be available in file formats that are easily accessible on popular operating systems of computers and other electronic devices, with integrity and security of the data being retained as per industry standards, it added."The transcription generated must be in searchable format, PDF/A (for archiving and long-term preservation), HTML, Word Process, etc. The transcription generated through AI tools must bear time stamp and be capable of integration with video recordings of court proceedings. The AI tool to be deployed must have all the latest features, particularly, bookmarking, labels and markers for quick access and convenience."Further, the tools must be capable of generating metadata and being shared through application programming interfaces (APIs)."The AI tool must also be capable to generate summarisation of transcription, be it speaker centric and/or party specific, etc. for further classification.".During the recent hearings of the Constitution Bench in the Maharashtra politics case, the top court had begun a test run of live transcription of court proceedings with the use of AI.Bar & Bench had first reported about the development and how the top court would be employing such technology driven by Natural Language Processing.The transcription service was being done by TERES, a company which has been providing this facility to arbitration practitioners..[Read document]