Court steno jobs will remain amid AI transcript deployment

Supreme Court Chief Justice Alexander G. Gesmundo has assured court stenographers they will not lose their jobs due to the Supreme Court’s full deployment of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered voice-to-text transcription tools, which can transcribe “Taglish.”

Instead, he said, the new technology will support their work.

Gesmundo delivered the assurance while speaking at the First Regional Convention and Seminar of the Court Stenographers Association of the Philippines in Tagaytay City recently.

He shared positive outcomes from a pilot implementation that ran from July 2023 to September 2024, involving the Sandiganbayan and 41 select first- and second-level courts.

Using Scriptix, an AI-driven transcription platform, participating courts saw an average 50 percent reduction in transcription time, with some achieving up to an 80 percent cut. This advanced technology led to faster turnaround of court transcripts and allowed personnel to focus on more substantive judicial tasks.

Accuracy also significantly improved, starting at 70 percent and reaching 90 to 95 percent with continued use by court personnel. The tool also demonstrated increasing precision in handling “Taglish,” the common mix of Tagalog and English used in Philippine courtrooms.