# The State of Commercial Automatic French Legal Speech Recognition Systems and their Impact on Court Reporters et al

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.11940 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11940/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 9 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Listen, Attend and Spell](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01211/) (2015)
- [Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02595/) (2015)
- [Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.5567/) (2014)
- [Google USM: Scaling Automatic Speech Recognition Beyond 100 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01037/) (2023)
- [SpeechStew: Simply Mix All Available Speech Recognition Data to Train One Large Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02133/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Lost in Transcription, Found in Distribution Shift: Demystifying Hallucination in Speech Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12414/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In Quebec and Canadian courts, the transcription of court proceedings is a critical task for appeal purposes and must be certified by an official court reporter. The limited availability of qualified reporters and the high costs associated with manual transcription underscore the need for more efficient solutions. This paper examines the potential of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems to assist court reporters in transcribing legal proceedings. We benchmark three ASR models, including commercial and open-source options, on their ability to recognize French legal speech using a curated dataset. Our study evaluates the performance of these systems using the Word Error Rate (WER) metric and introduces the Sonnex Distance to account for phonetic accuracy. We also explore the broader implications of ASR adoption on court reporters, copyists, the legal system, and litigants, identifying both positive and negative impacts. The findings suggest that while current ASR systems show promise, they require further refinement to meet the specific needs of the legal domain.