Supreme Court Invites Bids For AI Tools To Transcribe Arguments & Proceedings

The Supreme Court on Tuesday invited bids towards the deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for the transcription of oral arguments and court proceedings.

According to the Court’s bid document, eligible companies must be formed under the Companies Act or be a government agency with two years of proven experience offering such systems either nationally or globally.

“The AI tool for transcription of arguments and court proceedings shall be deployed initially for Constitution Bench matters and, with the passage of time, extendable to all matters, subject to the approval and directions of the concerned Court.”

“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 of the transcription to the Registry. The Supreme Court aims to publish the AI-generated transcription on its official website and to distribute it electronically with the relevant Advocates,” the bid document stated, offering a glimpse into how the process will work.

AI-generated transcriptions must be available in file formats that are easily accessible on popular computer operating systems and other electronic devices, with data integrity and security maintained in accordance with industry standards, it noted.

“The generated transcription must be in searchable format, PDF/A (for archiving and long-term preservation), HTML, Word Process, and so on. The transcription produced by AI technologies must include a time stamp and be compatible with video recordings of court sessions. The AI tool that will be installed must include all of the most recent capabilities, including bookmarking, labelling, and markers for easy access and convenience,” it stated.

Furthermore, the tools must be capable of producing metadata and sharing it via application programming interfaces (APIs).

“The AI tool must also be able to generate transcription summaries, whether speaker-centric or party-specific, for further classification,” it stated.

During the recent hearings of the Constitution Bench in the Maharashtra politics case, the Supreme Court began a test run of live transcription of court proceedings using AI.