The Benefits of an Automated Audio-to-Text Transcription Process

Whether initiated by regulators or your own internal teams, trade compliance investigations are becoming the norm. Rapid response to investigative requests (in some cases within 72 hours) is mandated by a host of regulations and standards, including MiFID II, MAR, FX Code of Conduct and Dodd-Frank. If you’re on the receiving end of these requests, you know that regulators and legal teams are increasingly asking to receive transcripts of every trade-related call, in addition to the actual voice recordings.

For complex investigations involving large volumes of calls, finding every call, manually downloading and transcribing them, can be a long, tedious and manual process. There are additional costs and delays when recordings need to be sent to an outside company for transcription. What if you could accelerate your trade investigations and improve your responsiveness to regulators by automating costly and time-consuming manual processes around retrieving, downloading and transcribing trade communications?

1. Faster Trader investigations

At NICE we developed a new application, NICE COMPASS Discovery, that can significantly reduce the time involved in searching for, downloading and transcribing calls for trade investigations. Your firm can react and respond to regulatory and legal investigations with lightning speed. Voice recordings are downloaded in bulk, at a very fast rate. Audio is extracted and then transcribed. There’s no waiting to send audio recordings out to an external company for manual transcription, or waiting days to get transcripts back! And with automated transcription in the cloud, your investigations won’t be constrained by manual transcription.

2. More Efficient and Cost Effective Process

Once your manual processes of downloading and transcribing recordings are automated, it will free up time, so you can focus on other more important things. Also, outsourced transcription services are expensive, while with NICE COMPASS Discovery, there’s no more sending audio recordings out to expensive third-party providers for manual transcription.

3. Scalable from Small to Large Investigations

In case of highly complex trade investigations, which may require millions of recordings to be downloaded in a single day, you’ll need an automated bulk download. With NICE COMPASS Discovery you can download up to 1.7 million calls per day using a single extraction server (and add more capacity as needed). You can find, retrieve and extract audio from any NICE Trading Recording (NTR) system, at any site on your network. NICE COMPASS and NTR can scale to support the investigative needs of your entire global enterprise.

4. Accurate and Consistent Transcriptions

Powered by Nexidia, NICE’s award-winning automatic speech recognition engine, NICE COMPASS Discovery’s hosted speech-to-text transcription solution offers an extremely high degree of accuracy over other automated transcription tools and manual (human) transcription methods. Automated transcription eliminates errors caused by fatigue and other distraction.

Additionally, trader communications come with a unique set of problems for transcription – they’re full of slang and jargon, include overlapping speech and pitch variations, and audio clips can be very brief (a few seconds). NICE’ speech recognition technology returns highly accurate results regardless of audio quality, speaker accents, dialects, slang and non-standard grammatical patterns. NICE COMPASS Discovery’s transcription engine can transcribe audio recordings in 44 different languages around the world, with new language packs being added continuously. The Nexidia Speech-to-Text engine can handle all types of audio qualities, accents, and formats.

How does it work?

NICE COMPASS Discovery was designed to work with the NICE Trading Recording (NTR). Used by most of the world’s leading banks and investment firms to record and retain trade conversation from turrets, desk phones, mobile phones, and Unified Communications platforms, NTR is an "all-in-one" compliance-focused trade conversation recording platform. Using NTR and NICE COMPASS Discovery, you can dramatically improve the speed, consistency and quality of transcriptions. Here’s how it works:

1. SEARCH

Search for the voice recordings you’d like to transcribe using a variety of metadata including:

• Trader ID
• Transaction number
• Trading desk groups
• Time period, etc.

2. TRANSCRIBE

Use NICE COMPASS’ automated bulk call extraction capability to download the audio recordings you need, fast. Downloaded recordings are automatically ingested into the NICE cloud-based voice-to-text transcription system, transcribed and saved. Transcriptions are automatically packaged together with associated .wav audio recordings, and an inventory of file names and metadata, so recipients can read and listen to the original content and get the full context of who said what and when,

3. DOWNLOAD

When the transcriptions are complete, you can easily search transcriptions by call-id or keywords to pinpoint calls that are relevant to an investigation, and download selected or all at once.

4. SHARE

Now you can easily share your downloaded transcriptions and associated audio recordings with regulators or internal requesters.

Part of the NICE Compliance Assurance solution

NICE COMPASS Discovery is part of the NICE COMPASS solution suite. Together NICE COMPASS and NTR minimize the burden of growing financial communication regulatory requirements by helping firms provide comprehensive evidence of compliance around the requirement to record regulated employees, retain communications and reconstruct trades. NICE COMPASS streamlines compliance assurance processes by automating provisioning, system health checks, call extraction, and compliance assurance reporting.

Want to see for yourself how the Speech-to-Text process can be automated? Schedule a free demo of NICE COMPASS Trader Voice Transcription!