Artificial intelligence is now taking over for the traditional court stenographer.

Israeli company Verbit already provides automated captioning and transcription services to over 2,000 businesses around the world; now it’s launching Legal Real-Time, a version of its technology tailored specifically to the courtroom.

Verbit says it provides accurate and reliable real-time transcriptions for legal proceedings at a fraction of the cost of traditional stenography.

Court reporters – or stenographers – are still employed in courts around the world to produce verbatim accounts of every word spoken during proceedings.

They use a special 22-key keyboard, with combinations of keys for syllables rather than letters, allowing them to reach speeds of up to 300 words per minute. But they’re in short supply.

“We recognize that there is a shortage of human court reporters and that court reporting agencies are looking to leverage captioning technologies to meet these gaps,” said Verbit CEO Yair Amsterdam. “Legal Real-Time is designed to support all court reporting agencies’ live transcription needs.”

He explained that Legal Real-Time covers depositions, hearings, arbitrations, examinations, trials and other legal proceedings, delivering immediate rough drafts and providing expedited final transcripts.

Legal Real-Time has been designed by legal experts to help streamline transcription workflows, providing quicker delivery of both live and recorded legal proceedings such as depositions, hearings and examinations, as well as digital evidence like dash cam and body cam footage and emergency and other recorded phone calls. Attorneys can skim through the transcript as the session progresses, searching for terms or playing the audio back.

The AI comes ready, armed with a huge vocabulary of legal terms and case-specific terms, and constantly expands its glossary. It also understands and identifies the various people speaking in the courtroom.

Verbit is a major player in real-time transcription, an industry valued at $30 billion. Since it was founded in Tel Aviv in 2017, it has become one of Israel’s unicorns – companies valued at over $1 billion – and has reached a $2 billion valuation.

Its technology is used globally to transcribe almost 4 million hours of speech a year, in 51 languages, across a wide range of industries.

“The addition of our [courtroom] transcription service means that customers can have all of their needs met in one place,” said Jim Holmes, Verbit’s chief revenue officer. “Verbit offers both real-time and post-production transcription tools, providing complete workflow solutions for court reporters and court reporting agencies.”