Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine Mykhailo Fedorov met with representatives of Amazon and presented them with an award from the president for supporting Ukraine. The company helped the Ministry of Digital Transformation even before the full-scale war. He reported it in his official Telegram channel. 

“Yesterday we met with Amazon. Even before the start of the war, they began to provide us with capacity to store backups of registers. That’s tens of millions of dollars in support. Many people in the company work after hours, free of charge, in projects supporting Ukraine,” says Mykhailo Fedorov.  

He also announced new projects together with the technology giant. The Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine has plans to implement artificial intelligence in Ukrainian courts. It will participate in decision-making regarding administrative violations. The minister noted that Amazon already has similar examples. 

Face recognition as a tool of law enforcement

At the beginning of 2019, an article about facial recognition technology was published on the Amazon blog. Among other things, it talked about the use of technology by law enforcement officers to identify violators.

“Facial recognition is often used to ‘narrow the field’ from hundreds of thousands of potential matches, to a handful; it is this capability that benefits society in many ways by making it easier and more efficient to complete tasks that would take humans far more time,” says the text. 

At the same time, Amazon emphasizes that such a tool can be used as an aid and should not make decisions in the event that these decisions may limit civil rights. Artificial intelligence should be one of many elements of the investigation. In turn, law enforcement officers must use it transparently in order to earn the public’s trust. 

Artificial intelligence in the legal field

In 2021, artificial intelligence from Amazon found a wider application to help lawyers. Epiq Company used it to transcribe court proceedings, and to search and provide electronic information as evidence for court.

“Multimedia assets, such as audio and video from police cameras or smartphones, are increasing in court cases, compared to text-based assets, such as articles and emails. Manually transcribing multimedia assets wouldn’t make financial sense”, says the article.  

To automate the transcription of court sessions, Epiq used Amazon Transcribe. The deep learning-based tool automatically recognizes speech and converts it to text. The transcription made by AI turned out to be fast and 85% accurate. 

Epiq also applied development to complement e-search and improve multimedia handling. By converting media resources to text, they made the system homogeneous. With a technical representation of audio and video that can be indexed, the company has automated the electronic search of materials. Epiq has been able to reduce transcription costs while handling ever-increasing amounts of multimedia resources for its customers.