THE Supreme Court said it will harness artificial intelligence (AI) tools and applications, including transcription technology, to assist court stenographers in doing their job, Chief
Justice Alexander Gesmundo said yesterday.
Gesmundo said the courts nationwide have been having a hard time over the past decade in finding new stenographers.
He underscored the importance of the stenographers’ work, pointing out that their workloads pile up as more court cases are filed.
Gesmundo said the lack of stenographers, coupled with the “overwhelming” caseloads have resulted to delays in the submission of stenographic notes, which in turn also delays the resolution of cases.
“These delays have consequences not only for the dockets of our courts, ultimately, these delays also impact our people’s faith in the judiciary, and their confidence in its ability to effectively and efficiently dispense the justice they seek in it,” Gesmundo told the Court Stenographers Association of the Philippines during their national convention on Wednesday.
To remedy the problem, the chief justice said the Strategic Plan for Judicial Innovations (SPJI) 2022-2017 will, among others, allow the SC to invest on AI not just in court operations but also in stenographic works.
“I am sure you have seen in social media the growing popularity – alongside no little controversy – of AI tools. There are AI applications generating art and photorealistic images based on prompts that you type in. There are convincingly human-like chatbots like ChatGPT that answers questions and generate writings in whatever style you want for whatever purpose you may have,” Gesmundo said.
He said AI can help courts hurdle in real-time challenges in stenography, adding stenographers can harness AI-enabled voice-to-text transcription services to make their work more efficient and more effective.
“We are looking to study and harness the same tools here. After these tools generate automatic transcripts, stenographers can then make corrections and enhancements. These will be fed back into the software’s system through adaptive algorithms, allowing it to constantly improve,” the chief justice said.
