1. Forensic (including "disputed utterances")

Transcripts can be made of recorded events, and presented in a written form to assist judge, counsel and jury to follow these events.

AudioLex has special expertise in the transcription of "difficult" recordings - particularly poor quality covert surveillance recordings - and can utilise a number of methods to improve the clarity of recorded utterances and other sounds.

Because of the nature of the transcription task, it is the policy of this firm to categorise completed transcripts according to the difficulty - and therefore potential completeness - of each individual recording or section of a recording. This completeness is dependent upon several factors including, obviously, the recording quality and the time allotted to the task. It should be understood that except in rather rare circumstances, a "verbatim" transcript of a covert or difficult recording is not a realistic expectation.

The categories of final versions of transcripts are as follows:

Category 1 : draft

Category 2 : "optimum" straightforward transcript

Category 3 : "optimum" moderate transcript

Category 4 : "optimum" difficult transcript

Category 5 : incomplete difficult transcript - not intended to be used as hard evidence but as a guide

An "optimum" transcript is that which can reasonably be achieved in the time allotted. All transcripts will benefit from unlimited time but this is rarely a practical consideration.

Our practice is to make it perfectly clear which areas of the completed transcript are probable or possible, rather than verbatim wordings.

Examples of "straightforward" transcripts include most PACE interviews, conference papers, speeches, and some business meetings.

Examples of "moderate" transcripts include many 999 calls, messages left on telephone answering machines, clearly recorded meetings or conversations involving 2 or 3 participants, and some strong-dialect, speaker-impaired or non-native speaker recordings.

Examples of "difficult" transcripts include many of those recorded by a concealed (covert) device, such as a vehicle, premises or body-recorder, recordings of telephone conversations by devices other than wire taps or dictaphone-type recorders, very noisy recordings, and the speech of a distressed, injured or drunk speaker.

Our methods include "close listening" on high fidelity equipment, loop playbacks, filtering and "binaural listening" techniques. Wherever possible, notice is also taken of the phonetic and phonological, syntactic, pragmatic, lexical and dialectal strategies used by the speaker. Frequency measurements (electronic acoustic analysis) can also be of use, for example, it may be possible to differentiate the word "I" from the word "we" by comparing formants of the relevant vowels.

2. Legal and Business

We can also undertake the transcription of legal and business recordings (such as PACE interviews, meetings and conferences).

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