Listen Up: Audio Search Makes Noise

Law.com's Legal Technology editor, David Snow reports from LegalTech West Coast

By: David Snow
LegalTech West Coast
Jun. 07, 2006

Nexidia's audio search product for e-discovery, ESI 6.0, has turned some heads lately, including that of John Bringardner, one of our spies on the tradeshow floor. Bringardner, formerly news editor of ALM's Law Technology News magazine and now a reporter for the company's IP Law & Business magazine, took in a demo of Nexidia's search of Enron phone conversations.

"It's definitely the next thing coming, with all the voicemails out there," he said, referring to the growing burden on counsel to collect all types of electronically stored information for litigation.

Bringardner's not the only one who's heard Nexidia's siren song. E-discovery services provider Fios says it wants to work with Nexidia.

"We've been talking for a number of months now ... and we intend to pursue our relationahsip further," said Brad Harris, director of product management for Fios. "We're talking about how we can develop a broader e-discovery solution around audio analysis. We believe that their approach is far more efficient than traditional ones for the review process. It culls down a large data set, which then you can move into a search tool after a speech-to-text conversion."

The ESI 6.0 version, released in April, premieres Forensic Search, which speeds audio searches by identifying phoneme patterns rather than matching full words. Nexidia says it generates higher search accuracy than dictionary-dependent, speech-to-text based audio searches.

By the way, the product name "ESI" doesn't stand for "electronically stored information" -- a phrase used in the e-discovery amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure -- but it certainly seems like a fortunate coincidence for Nexidia's marketing department, if not shrewd branding. Nexidia's "ESI" stands for "Enterprise Speech Intelligence."