Legal transcription for case preparation: interviews, hearings and evidence

What a SozAI transcript is good for in legal work

AI does not replace the court reporter, and for the record nobody should ask it to. What it changes is how much of a case's audio the team actually gets through. Listening to a recording takes as long as the recording; reading its transcript takes minutes.

That audio usually sits in four piles:

• client intake and witness interviews you recorded yourself
• hearings and mediations you attended, where you hold a lawful recording or the official audio
• recordings produced in discovery, from voicemails to bodycam audio
• evidence in another language that nobody on the team speaks

For all four, a transcript you can read and search in a few minutes changes what you can review before the next deadline. You still check every passage you rely on against the audio.

Interviews and hearings, by speaker

Every upload comes back split by voice: Speaker A, Speaker B and so on. Rename them to roles in the iPhone or Android app or on the web ("Client", "Witness", "Judge", "Opposing counsel") and the names carry into that transcript and its exports.

A label is a voice, not an identity. Diarization groups speech by how it sounds, so two similar voices can end up under one label, and a judge far from the microphone can end up with two. Who said a line is something you confirm by listening, the same way you would check a quote.

Hearings are the hardest audio in this list. One phone on a bench picks up the nearest voice well and the far side of the room poorly. If the court publishes or sells its own audio, use that file instead of your own recording. And check before you record at all: many courts do not allow it, and some allow it only with the judge's permission.

Evidence in other languages

SozAI detects the language of a recording from the audio, across 99 languages, so a Spanish voicemail and a Russian phone call need no setup. Then translate the transcript in the app or on the web to read it in English beside the original.

Two limits matter here. Quality varies by language: in our published test the word error rate ran from 1.8% for Spanish to 19.6% for Arabic and 50% for Kazakh. And the language is detected once per file, so a call that switches languages midway can come out wrong in the second one. Use the transcript and translation to decide what matters; send those passages to a certified translator before anything goes to court.

Timecodes for citing

Each passage carries the time it starts. Tap or click it and the audio plays from that line, on the phone or on the web. In a memo or an outline you can cite a passage as "witness interview, 14:32" and anyone with the file can find it in seconds.

What you will not get is court formatting: no page and line numbers, no Q and A layout, no certification page. If you need those, that is a service such as Rev's legal transcripts, priced by the page.

Wrong word in a name or a figure? Correct the text in the phone app, line by line or all at once. The web and Mac versions show the transcript but do not edit it yet.

Getting the transcript out

From the iPhone, Android, Mac or iPad app: PDF, TXT, SRT, VTT or JSON. From web.sozai.app: TXT (with or without timecodes and speaker names), SRT or VTT. PDF, VTT and JSON keep speaker names and timing; SRT keeps timing only. There is no Word export, so open the TXT in Word or attach the PDF to the file.

What happens to privileged audio

Read this before you upload anything a client told you in confidence.

• The file travels to us over HTTPS and is stored on our servers.
• Speech recognition is done by a partner company in the US, which receives the audio. If you ask for a summary of the recording or questions about it, the transcript text goes to AI model providers. Every one of these companies, and what it receives, is listed on our sub-processor page.
• We do not sell recordings, and our own code never uses them to train models.
• You can delete a recording, or your whole account, yourself in the app or on the web. That removes the audio, transcript and notes from our servers. Encrypted database backups are kept for up to 12 months, and deleting in SozAI does not delete the copy at the speech recognition partner.
• We do not have an independent security audit report, access logs you can review, or sign-in through your firm's identity provider. Sign-in is with Google, Apple or a one-time email code.

If your client or your insurer requires an audited vendor, SozAI does not meet that requirement today; use a provider that does. If not, the American Bar Association's Formal Opinion 512 (July 2024) is a sensible checklist: know what the tool does with client information and check what it produces. It also asks whether you need the client's informed consent first. Your state bar may have its own guidance.

More detail: security at SozAI.

SozAI, Rev, Sonix and TurboScribe for legal recordings

As each company publishes it on its own pricing page, checked 25 October 2026. Click a name for the source.

Which one, then. Firms that need a record to file, or a vendor that passes a security questionnaire, should go to Rev: it sells human-checked transcripts in court format and publishes its audit documents. Sonix is the middle ground for a team that wants an editor and pay-as-you-go hours, with compliance paperwork on its higher plans. TurboScribe is the cheapest way through a large backlog of long English files. SozAI earns its place when the recordings are interviews and evidence in several languages, when they start on a phone, and when you want a translation and a summary next to the transcript.

Who it suits, and who it does not

A good fit for:

• solo lawyers and small firms preparing cases from interviews and hearings they attended
• immigration and asylum practices whose clients and evidence are in other languages
• paralegals working through audio produced in discovery
• in-house teams reviewing recorded internal interviews

Not a fit for:

• anything you will file or certify: order that from a court reporter or a legal transcription service
• firms whose policy or clients require an audited vendor, a signed data agreement or company sign-in
• live captioning of a hearing as it happens: SozAI transcribes once the recording is uploaded

For a legal team

Each person has their own account today; there are no shared matters or admin roles yet, and no firm-wide sign-in. Team plans: write to [email protected] and we will invoice your firm. See SozAI for teams.

Price

The first 30 minutes are free, once, with no card. After that, Premium is $4.99 a week or $79.99 a year, billed by the App Store or Google Play, with up to 700 hours of transcription and files up to 500 MB. See pricing.