It’s been some time since our last NetScribe release, and that’s because our development team has been deeply focused on one of the most significant features we’ve introduced so far—advanced formatting. The complexity of court formatting requirements cannot be overstated, with variations by county, state, province, and across the globe. Until now, these formatting needs were often handled manually in Word after court documents were transcribed.
Our new advanced formatting feature is a major milestone for VIQ. It enables courts to leverage our technology to seamlessly manage the entire workflow—from ingesting audio and video, to creating accurate speech-to-text transcriptions, to applying the proper formatting, and finally delivering the finished document. This represents the completion of an end-to-end solution, something we’ve been striving toward for a long time.
So, what does this mean for the court industry? VIQ is addressing real-world challenges that courts worldwide face. With staffing shortages becoming more common, our solutions empower courts to do more with fewer resources, all in less time. A potential client who recently experienced a demo of NetScribe summed it up best: “I love this—this is the future. I love everything about this.”
What’s Next
Our developers are already hard at work on the next release, which will include vendor management—a feature we’re excited about. We’re also improving the print preview function (because reviewing a 160-page court document in a small window isn’t ideal!) and making shortcut lists “sticky” from job to job, a feature our global operations teams have been requesting. And, of course, we’ll continue to enhance the advanced formatting capabilities.
What’s in the Release?
- Improvements to the Search Documents page.
- We had feedback from clients that the search documents page was lacking information and better searching capabilities.
- The organization has been added as a column to make it easier for anyone managing multiple clients to be able to identify which organization a file belongs to.
- Filtering and search capabilities have been added to each column to make it easier to find files that need to be downloaded.
- Ability to upload a Word template to a Delivery template.
- This goes hand and hand with the advanced formatter. The complex formatting is built on a Word template and that is then uploaded to the Delivery Template area which preserves the formatting parameters of the template. This is much easier than trying to build the complex template in NetScribe delivery template area.
- Advanced formatter.
- As mentioned on the release notes, this is in beta with a few select customers to get feedback for further enhancements. It will be opened up to more clients in a gradual fashion.
- There are different components – the template, the metadata definitions, and the tags.
- Improvements to tags with the ability to have some be mandatory.
- The tag area has existed for a long time, but it needed some enhancing to work with the advanced formatter.
- A tag can now be made mandatory by inserting an Asterix at the end of the format. Please note – if you mark a tag mandatory, you must fill in those metadata fields before you save and exit the editor or before submitting the job. If you do not, you will get an error message.
- Improved non-breaking spaces handling.
- We have been struggling with non-breaking spaces getting into documents and causing formatting issues, especially in the UK and Australia.
- There is a checkbox in the job type area to remove non-breaking spaces for any documents that are having them erroneously appear.
- Folio count calculation update.
- We had fixed the folio counts, as they differ from country to country, but we needed to add code to round them up, which is now done.
- Show audio start time in dashboard.
- This is mainly a feature for courts and especially for Australia. This will show the audio start (time of day) in the typist dashboard.
- New multi-line text metadata field.
- Another important element to the advanced formatter was to have metadata definitions be one line or multi-line.
- Bug fixes. There are 40+ bug fixes in this release across all geographies.
The release will be pushed to the UK environment on Tuesday, October 22nd, and once stable, to the remaining instances over the following 1-2 weeks.
