Record watch: transcription and justice in Canada and the U.S. — week of October 19, 2026
California’s Judicial Council drops a statewide rollout of machine translation at court counters; in Congress, the bill to study automatic transcription in courts gains a Senate co-sponsor.
California: machine translation at court counters is dropped
The Judicial Council of California cancelled, effective October 15, 2026, its request for proposals for an artificial intelligence voice-to-text translation program at the public counters of the state’s courts. Issued on August 24, the request had drawn proposals in late September; the contract was to start on December 1. The Times of San Diego reported it on October 23. The tool had been piloted in more than 30 courts, from 2021 to April 2026. In San Diego, staff preferred a telephone service with human interpreters, still in use: the tool struggled with fast speakers and offered neither Mandarin nor Haitian Creole. Two legal aid organizations, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and California Rural Legal Assistance, obtained hundreds of pages of pilot transcripts. The translators who reviewed them found errors of meaning: “DUI” rendered as “IUD,” a plea of no contest translated as an absence of competition, and, in an exchange about a restraining order with an Arabic speaker, the party seeking the order confused with the party receiving it. The transcripts do not identify their courts. The Council cites evolving technology and plans an internal review of accuracy and effectiveness before any new option; it has not published its evaluation of the pilot.
Why it matters: at the counter, a translation error changes what a person understands of their own case; the organizations ask that a qualified person review what the machine produces.
Congress: the study of automatic transcription in courts gains a Senate co-sponsor
On October 20, 2026, the journal of the National Court Reporters Association reported that Senator Raphael Warnock, Democrat of Georgia, has joined as a co-sponsor of the Research and Oversight of AI in Courts Act of 2026 (S. 4154 in the Senate, H.R. 7997 in the House). Introduced on March 19, 2026, by Senators Roger Wicker (Republican, Mississippi) and Peter Welch (Democrat, Vermont), and in the House by Representative Harriet Hageman (Republican, Wyoming), the bill would create a 15-member task force under the National Institute of Justice. For federal and state courts, it would examine whether automatic speech recognition, with or without artificial intelligence, changes the accuracy of transcripts of proceedings; whether it alters the speech of people with accents, dialects or speech impediments; its costs; the security and evidentiary value of the record; and whether a record created or modified by these tools should say so, with a notice or watermark and metadata naming the tool and its version. Non-federal members could not work for a vendor of these technologies. The final report would be due within 18 months. The bill has not been enacted.
Why it matters: the bill asks two things any record should be able to state: whether the transcript is accurate for every way of speaking, and who produced it.
What we take from it
Two decisions, one caution. California is suspending machine translation until its accuracy is shown; Congress wants to measure the accuracy of automatic transcription, accents and dialects included, and to know which tool produced each record. Our practice answers both questions: a person listens to the recording, transcribes each language as it was spoken, marks interpretation as interpretation, and signs the declaration of accuracy.
Sources
- Times of San Diego, “Plan to expand AI court translation halted after advocates fault with pilot project” (Oct. 23, 2026)
- Judicial Council of California, RFP-IT-2026-212-RB, “Voice-To-Text Translation Program” (cancelled Oct. 15, 2026)
- The JCR (National Court Reporters Association), “Sen. Warnock joins bipartisan push to examine AI in courts” (Oct. 20, 2026)
- U.S. Congress, H.R. 7997, Research and Oversight of AI in Courts Act of 2026 (introduced text, Mar. 19, 2026)
- Senator Peter Welch, press release “Wicker, Welch, Hageman Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Examine Use of AI Speech-to-Text Technologies in Federal Courts” (Mar. 19, 2026)
General information, not legal advice. Rules change and differ from one forum to the next: check the current text and what your forum requires.
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