VR and simulation concept. Credit: Who is Danny/Shutterstock.com

 

On Tuesday, Veritone released a new AI-powered application called Illuminate designed to assist e-discovery professionals with the transcription and translation of large, unstructured data sets. The product was designed to work across a variety of mediums, specifically documents, emails, audio and video, and serves as somewhat of an extension to the company's preexisting Relativity add-on.

While Veritone's history as an AI-based solutions developer means it's no stranger to the technology making all of the wheels spin, this does mark the first time that the company has launched a standalone e-discovery platform—which of course puts it up against some stiff competition from long-time incumbents.

What it is: At the most basic level, Veritone transcribes and translates audio and video, but the application also provides the ability to engage with that content forensically. For example, users can search for data using criteria such as keywords, objects or even faces.

There's also a visual analytics component that affords lawyers and e-discovery professionals the ability to view the data culled from video or audio samples organized into a series of concentric circles revolving around categories like “people” or “location.”

“What we've found is it's hit and miss whether law firms are analyzing video. I think over time it will become more and more prevalent,” said Chris Ricciuti, vice president of product management at Veritone.

Under the hood: Artificial intelligence provides the broad strokes, but there are a number of custom-built engines at play that do everything from transcribing to vocal fingerprinting. For that last one, a sample of a person's voice is fed into a library and used to train the AI, which can then determine if said voice is featured in an audio recording.

Text analytics functions provide the backbone of the platform's data visualization capabilities, which come in handy in the event that the user doesn't quite know what they are searching for inside a large stack of data.

“And that's particularly relevant in these large legal matters,” Ricciuti said.

Why it's necessary: Veritone's Relativity app also allows users to transcribe video and audio, but feedback the company received from law firms and service providers indicated that many users were taking entire audio and video files and dumping them into Relativity. Since multimedia files tend to take up much more cloud storage space than the average document, that can be a costly proposition.

The idea behind Illuminate is to pare down audio and video recordings to their most essential, case-related components before those files are fed to Relativity for processing and review.

“The storage costs for Illuminate are substantially lower. In fact, it's really not even a part of our business model to charge for storage,” Ricciuti said.

The competition: Illuminate isn't the only platform emphasizing speed and efficiency as key selling points. Relativity users, for example, can also utilize Authenticity.ai's Loud and Clear tech to transcribe audio and video files.

Meanwhile, Exterro has also emphasized its platform's capacity to process vast amounts of data throughout the collection process and has exploited AI to help identify connections lurking within the set.

Ricciuti is aware that e-discovery is a competitive market, but thinks that the multiple transcription engines Veritone uses within a single transcription process helps to set its platform apart. With an audio recording related to a hospital case, for example, one engine might sweep for generic language, while another does a pass for specialized medical jargon. Veritone's Conductor application then produces a cohesive transcription.

“It takes high confidence from one engine, high confidence from another engine and blends them so that what the users sees and what the user searches is much more accurate,” Ricciuti said.