PROBLEMS ARISING FROM RECORDING COURT SESSIONS

The most typical problems faced by tribal and municipal clerks in accurate minutes from court recording sessions are:
1. Excessive background noise

2. Participants “talking over” each other
3. Poor diction
4. Speaker being too far away from the microphones
5. Not enough microphones
6. Inability to identify the speaker

7. Poor cassette audio recording

8. Mobile phones lack of key recording features and issue of need for unalterable recordings

9. Constantly changing meeting rooms/spaces with very different sound capture environments

IDEAL RECORDING FEATURES FOR CLERKS IN TRIBAL DELIBERATIONS.

• Defendant, Witnesses, experts, judges can participate remotely in court proceedings
• Record in one file proceedings involving multiple in-room and virtual participants
• Automatically recognize recorded voices
• Clerks are able to add notes to recordings in real time
• Immediate availability of non-alterable recordings to participants
• Immediate archiving to tribal court network
• Settings for recording can be established in-room or remotely
• Recordings can be uploaded to cloud services for transcription, captioning, or translation
• One-time purchase cost typically less than 25% compared to competition
• No annual subscription expenses
• Recorder can work with existing in-court microphones
• Portable, simple “one button” operation.

SOLUTIONS TO CLERKS’ RECORDING PROBLEMS

Municipal and court clerks can rely on Speech2Data’s digital audio meeting recorders for their audio, data, and note-taking requirements.

Recorder’s Top Features:

Stand-alone operability. Our recorders have built-in microphones and speakers and easily enable remote participants to participate. Alternatively, our recorder can be simply connected to a meeting room’s existing audio system. 

Battery-operated portability. Our recorders provide both AC power and built-in batteries that offer 4 to 6 hours of operation.

Noise control. Whether the source of the background noise is an air conditioner, a scraping chair, coughing, or “side bar” chatter, our recorders have special electronic noise management technology that will automatically reduce background sounds.

Note-taking flexibility. Our recorders enable the clerk to append a typewritten note that is tagged to any particular moment of the recording. This increases the accuracy of the final meeting minutes.

Microphone management. Our recorders can accept up to eight microphones of any type – whether handheld, wireless, or ceiling arrays – in addition to the two-built-in microphones embedded in our recorders. This means clerks no longer need to make do with small portable (cassette or digital) recorders that could make the follow up tasks of preparing final minutes unnecessarily difficult and prone to errors.

Speaker identification. Our recorders assign a separate track for each microphone and; therefore, enable the clerk to assign a speaker’s identity to each channel, making the task of correctly identifying speakers in the preparation of final meeting minutes easier.

Management of hybrid meetings. Although there continues to be a declining proportion of meetings that provide remote speaker integration, there is still a need to easily manage hybrid meetings to enable all participants to be included live and in recorded sessions. Our recorders eliminate the need to have duplicate recorded files – one captured on the remote platform (ZOOM, MEETINGS, etc.) and the other for the in-room participants using in-room microphones.

Meeting minutes, archiving, and distribution. The embedded Ethernet port provided in our recorders is a very important additional capability for clerks. Meeting recordings can be managed by the IT department in many ways.  They can remotely set up the meetings calendar on any of our recorders, transfer completed meetings to any pre-designated server or cloud location, and can delete old recorded files according to IT file management protocols. 

Meeting location flexibility. The flexibility of multiple microphone capability truly is a unique additional benefit for clerks dealing with last-minute venue changes, as is the added option of getting assistance from IT to manage such unexpected situations.

 Indexing and note integration. Our RECORDERS index all audio recordings with the integration of notes. For ease of search, it skips to the corresponding audio file related to the notes. This avoids the need to listen in its entirety.

Simultaneous readback and recording. Audio recording continues as it skips back and reads back to the index point. Similar to a high-end integrated system, our RECORDERS offer an efficient way to perform both tasks simultaneously. 

Redundant recording storage. Our RECORDERS are plug-and-play and create M4a files. Backup files are automatically created in two places, an internal drive and a USB flash drive. This feature avoids the accidental removal and loss of files.