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By Serena Wellen, Vice President of Product Management at LexisNexis Legal and Professional
While we are still many years away from a Star Trek-like scenario where we can ask “the computer” to run a diagnostic on the warp core, or ask C3PO to help with repairs on the Millenium Falcon, we are getting closer every day with emerging technologies and with the continual improvements to voice-based assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant, which are steadily becoming more accurate, intuitive, and professional.
In 2025, we can expect to see voice assistants perform a more diverse range of tasks. We can also expect improvements in the personalization and accuracy of these tasks, which will help solve what I call the “interruption problem.”
What Is the Interruption Problem?
The interruption problem refers to any time you are interrupted in your daily work – something that happens frequently to knowledge workers. Every time you stop reading or writing something to look up a term that’s unfamiliar, find an example, or consult a colleague, there’s a cognitive tax. Once you’ve completed that secondary task, you must reorient yourself and recover your train of thought on the original task. Of course, the interruption problem has always been with us, but it has been made worse in the present era with so many things coming at us on our phones, tablets, and computers. The result is not just mental exhaustion, but also a significant loss of time, because it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds, on average, to reorient yourself to the work and resume your train of thought.
Having worked in and around the legal industry most of my career, I know first-hand that legal professionals are plagued by this problem on a daily basis. We are constantly being interrupted by emails, calls, and other requests that require us to switch gears and take up another device or tool. But also, by the sheer nature of our work, we can’t know everything we possibly need to know about a case or contract while we’re drafting a document, talking to a client on the phone, or researching past case law. We must stop and consult other documents, log in to research platforms, or follow up on workflows, often leaving the current platform (like Microsoft Word) in which we are working.
The Allure of Voice Assistants
For as long as the legal profession has existed, attorneys have used voice dictation to accelerate their work and spend less time doing things like summarizing depositions. But this type of voice dictation was a one-way street – either another human was writing down what was said, or a computer was simply generating straight text. There was no thought or analysis being done, and no interaction that might result in new knowledge or insight.
But things have begun to change. Today’s younger generations are much more oriented toward voice. They use it in their daily lives all the time: when texting, asking for directions, searching on Amazon – the list is endless. In fact, when speaking to students recently, we heard over and over again: “I don’t like to type. I don’t use text. I want to just be able to say what I need to say and move on.”
Legal professionals love the idea of a voice-activated assistant that can answer legal questions, find information, and guide them while they stay in the flow and platform of their original task. The problem is that voice technology to this point has not been accurate or precise enough for lawyers – it simply could not understand “legalese” with enough nuance and subtlety to find and interpret complex answers.
Advancements in Voice Assistants
With the introduction of generative AI, the promise of voice assistants is getting closer to reality. We’ve already seen law firms incorporate generative AI into their workflows for document summarization, drafting contracts, preparing tax returns, and legal research. But in most cases, using generative AI to perform these tasks still requires the lawyer to leave what they’re doing, open a new application to conduct their research by typing in commands, then come back and reorient themselves to their original task.
However, the combination of generative AI with voice technology is now poised to make a huge leap forward. With new and better voice-to-text and text-to-voice capabilities, and with vastly improved language understanding capabilities, a lawyer can verbally give a command or ask a question, have the application search a designated company database, and get a verbal reply with a multi-faceted answer – all while keeping the lawyer inside their current workflow, eliminating the need to type and minimizing interruptions.
While in the past it may have been problematic to talk out loud in an office environment, library, or classroom, today many lawyers are working in hybrid environments, including their homes, where there’s more privacy to preserve confidentiality, and where it’s acceptable to talk and listen without disturbing other people or having them eavesdrop.
In 2025, we will see additional improvements to the technology focused on personalization. That means that legal professionals will be able to “train” their voice assistant to understand their unique work patterns, anticipate their likely intent and provide deeper analysis, and engage in more sophisticated dialogue with clarifying questions and customized answers. Taken together, all of these improvements will make significant gains toward solving the interruption problem.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
As Vice President of Product Management at LexisNexis, Serena Wellen is dedicated to making customers’ lives better through the creative use of machine learning, NLP, advanced visualization, and other AI-enabled technologies to solve their problems. She is passionate about product management and coaching her multidisciplinary teams to be leaders in innovation and execution. She also works hard to advance the rule of law around the world.
