Sound techniques for audio e-discovery

Sound techniques for audio e-discovery

February 4, 2009: Autonomy has unveiled an advanced audio eDiscovery solution that is claimed to deliver a 95 percent reduction in the volume of audio recordings requiring review, significantly reducing eDiscovery costs while simultaneously boosting investigators' confidence.

This is achieved due to Autonomy's ability to automatically understand the concepts and identify speakers in hundreds of hours of audio recordings, as well as its ability to link audio with other data types, including email.

Today, audio has become one of the most common forms of evidence requested by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), with legacy audio processing costing organizations 80 percent more per gigabyte than email.

Recent regulations, such as the SEC 17a (4) in the United States and the FSA COBS 11.8 in the United Kingdom require that all content formats, including audio, be captured and maintained for compliance purposes.

Unlike legacy eDiscovery methods for audio, which are difficult to use, time-consuming and costly with the results often failing to meet the court's expectations, Autonomy fully integrates this traditionally untapped asset into all phases of the investigative process, saving costs and reducing risks of legal penalty for organizations.

"The current economic environment has brought eDiscovery to the forefront with investigators increasingly looking for potentially incriminating evidence in previously overlooked formats, such as audio and video," commented Mike Sullivan, CEO of Autonomy ZANTAZ.

"Autonomy's Audio eDiscovery allows legal teams to quickly evaluate audio assets and prioritize review, resulting in substantial cost-savings and providing organizations with a distinct advantage in and out of court."

Autonomy's Audio eDiscovery solution offers capabilities, including: * Adjustable search confidence - Autonomy's Confidence Bar allows the investigator to easily expand or tighten the focus of each search, a clear advantage when seeking the unknown needle in a haystack or following a known data trail. * Advanced audio redaction with redaction type and annotation - This Autonomy exclusive ability for legal teams to perform their own audio redactions in a manner virtually identical to text redactions will save countless hours and reduce costs significantly. * Speaker identification - Eliminates the costly and protracted process of contracting lawyers to listen to hundreds of hours of audio to identity files containing specific speakers. * EDD capabilities for all major call center systems - Many call recording systems utilize proprietary formats requiring a pre-processing step to reassemble the audio and associated meta and TAPI data to the original state. The Autonomy EDD process automates this step and provides complete documentation of the process. * Message Tracer, Clustering, and Find Similar - Help investigators put audio into context with other content, connecting custodians and improving understanding of the flow of information. * Phonetic, word spotting & conceptual searching - By automatically selecting the appropriate search technology for each task, the need for audio expertise is eliminated, search consistency is improved and the overall process is streamlined, reducing resource requirements and costs.

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