New AI tool for police interviews 80 percent accurate

New AI interview recording technology - which averages 80 percent accuracy - will be used by NZ Police from today.

The Auto-Transcribe technology from taser-maker Axon will turn speech into text for investigators and prosecutions staff.

It is the latest of several AI-powered systems from American firms that NZ Police have recently moved to bring in to help investigators.

But one barrister says there will be cyber breaches and mishaps in the "rush" to find savings with artificial intelligence, while another questioned if more of the workload would fall on lawyers to check that transcripts used in evidence were accurate.

NZ Police said it had followed its policy on introducing new technology.

"This is a supporting tool expected to save time in investigative and judicial processes," National Criminal Investigation Group acting director Stuart Mills told RNZ.

Eighty percent accurate

Axon said Auto-Transcribe averaged 80 percent accuracy on public safety data and more than 90 percent as audio got clearer.

"These speech-to-text records are not always accurate," said Mills.

"Before acting on information, investigators must confirm and corroborate it and record that verification on the file."

Prosecutions staff could provide the auto-transcribed record - together with the digital interview - to a defendant or lawyer.

"The process of transcribing interviews undertaken by our Transcription Services team will stay the same. When the court requires a transcript, it will be prepared, reviewed, and verified by people."

Axon said on its website that the tool could find key moments for human translation, instantly find keywords or phrases and " focus your attention where it matters most".

"Auto-Transcribe transforms the entire evidence management process," it said.

Arizona-based Axon also supplies police with tasers and has stored some interviews, as well as taser and Eagle helicopter footage for them in Australian datacentres. In other countries it is a large bodycam supplier. Some of its products are controversial with civil liberties groups.

'Rushing headlong'

RNZ was first alerted to the tests with Auto-Transcribe by a year-old police email recently released under the Official Information Act.

Police began looking at it to replace their old DVD system at around the same time in 2025 they were testing, debating or adopting several other AI systems to save investigators time, as RNZ has revealed.

But Upper Hutt barrister Michael Bott has questioned if the new technology would make legitimate access to vital information more difficult - such as putting a timelock on it - while also making breaches more likely.

"The whole system's now being increasingly underfunded. When that's the case, it's always easy to take shortcuts," said Bott.

"The risk here is that they're rushing headlong into embracing AI without looking at ringfencing and making sure there are safeguards for people."

He likened it to Health New Zealand, with big concerns over the pace of health digitisation, according to official findings into the Manage My Health mass cyber breach released on Friday.

'You're just moving some of the workload'

Mills told RNZ the new Axon system would save time for investigative and judicial processes, and allow the police staff in the Transcription Service to focus more on transcripts for court.

Senior Auckland barrister Chris Wilkinson-Smith has seen Auto-Transcribe in action. The Criminal Bar Association was on a committee that discussed the tech with police, he said.

Wilkinson-Smith said officers on the beat with smartphones would likely use it a lot.

He said it was a trade-off, because police had so much information to handle.

"Obviously somebody should check it if it's then becoming evidential, but it's so easy now for a constable to simply pull out their police app on the smartphone.

"These police officers will be under time pressures. So the extent to which the automatically generated transcripts are checked, that's always going to be an issue.

"So probably it'll fall back on prosecutors and defence counsel ... you're just moving some of the workload from the police to the lawyers."

However it was more difficult for defence counsel to check these things, Wilkinson-Smith added.

Overseas alignment

A wider concern was police committing to AI products from overseas companies that it would be difficult and costly to switch out of, said Wilkinson-Smith.

"Police are buying these AI packages from overseas companies. They have all sorts of features, but some of those features probably infringe on New Zealand's standards of privacy and Bill of Rights.

"Ideally all this data should stay within New Zealand and the software tools we use should be tailored for the New Zealand legal system and ideally created here."

Bott said the fact Axon was based in Arizona raised data security issues. "We've seen in recent times, sadly, the US government isn't backwards in coming forward and making use of data from other countries."

Mills said NZ Police had worked in line with policy on adopting new technology, including developing a privacy impact assessment.

RNZ has asked for that assessment. Police said that would require a formal OIA request.

Two techs on the go

The email that mentioned Auto-Transcribe was in a discussion in late 2025 about how some local staff were in the dark over the rollout of TransScriptor, a separate AI platform. This uses translator tool Whisper AI.

A tech assurance manager told the director of the National Criminal Investigations Group Keith Borrell they had to make sure the use of Whisper did not run counter to the use of Axon's tool.

Axon said on its website it had tested Auto-Transcribe on multiple variations of English and accents.

Mills said NZ Police had worked on it with its own Transcription Services staff because the new tech resulted in some changes to its processes, by moving away from DVDs to digital recordings for transcribing.

For investigators, there was clear guidance on how to use it to review a speech-to-text record quickly or search for key words or terms, he said.

Axon has a related and controversial product - Draft One - that uses AI to process the audio from police bodycams and write up a first draft report. The American Civil Liberties Union summed up the problems as "unreliability and biased nature of AI, evidentiary and memory issues when officers resort to this technology, and ... transparency".

The cost of storing data generated by the new tech and by bodycams has troubled some US police departments but the counter argument is AI processing may save money long term.

Police in Los Angeles has been working on a $400m, 10-year deal with Axon for Draft One, thousands of bodycams and tasers and cloud storage for police video.

NZ police said they were not using Draft One.