5 Ways to Reduce the Cost of Your Investigations

The complexity of modern investigations requires more resources than ever before. This includes personnel, skills and knowledge, technology and finances; and investigation teams are seeing rises in travel, interpreter, transcription and validation costs. This is exacerbated by new advances in technology like generative AI which can produce highly realistic deepfake material, therefore requiring digital evidence to be verified for its provenance.

MeaConnexus is a secure, tamper-evident video interview platform designed to reduce the cost of interviewing for investigators. MeaFuse is a secure, tamper-evident application designed to capture, store and manage digital material from any device. In this article we will explore five ways these products reduce the cost of investigations, alongside the time-saving benefit too.

 

01. Eliminate travel & venue spend with secure remote interviews

There are many costs associated with travel for investigators, from transport costs like mileage or flights to accommodation, per-diems or even overtime. An interview or meeting (that could take place online) quickly rises in cost, taking away important budget from other areas of the organisation or department.

With MeaConnexus, investigators or interviewers can run tamper-evident interviews remotely from any device. No download required, as the platform is hosted over a browser, ideal for all participants. Interviewers can quickly send invites to interviewees using the Connect Now feature, which sends an interview invite via SMS or email. If you would rather schedule interviews, this can be done within MeaConnexus, creating a meeting invite which can be shared via Outlook to all participants.

To conduct interviews with a ‘one-way mirror’, interviewers can invite silent observers to participate in the interviews. The observers will be invisible to the interviewees and can feed private messages to the interviewer to assist with questioning.

 

02. Replace manual & outsourced transcription with built‑in automation

Whether interviews or meetings are transcribed in-house or via a third party, there is an inherent cost to transcription. It’s common to spend hours re-typing and indexing a transcription, taking away valuable time or resources.

With MeaConnexus you receive an automatic transcription at the end of your interviews. These transcriptions are time-coded and include the names of the participants, so you know exactly what was said, when it was said and by who. This saves your team both time and money, resulting in faster resolutions as you can easily scan the transcript for keywords and share this transcript with colleagues or external parties.

This speech-to-text feature is also available in MeaFuse, ideal for face-to-face interviews or even translating recorded audio/video which you can upload into MeaFuse.

 

03. Cut interpreter fees with real‑time translation & live captions

In a world that continues to get smaller, whether that’s via the internet or through physically travelling to other countries, translation has become a necessity. Language barriers restrict communication, leading to delays or even miscommunication. Typically, an interpreter is brought into a meeting or interview to translate between the participants, but this can be costly. Those hiring the interpreter need to consider the hourly rates of the interpreter, whether more than one interpreter is needed in multi-language sessions and any rescheduling costs. The interview or meeting is now reliant on this interpreter, and if they are unavailable, this will delay the session, leading to further costs.

Fortunately, MeaConnexus includes real-time translation, which supports the translation of 144 languages and dialects, with up to 5 simultaneous languages during one interview or meeting. This feature provides live captioning; all you have to do is set your own language and the language you would like the captions to be displayed in. Afterwards, the interview is transcribed in both the native and translated speech.

As well as real-time translation, you can use the live captioning feature to provide subtitles during your interview or meeting. This is ideal for those that are hard of hearing or prefer to read along with a conversation, ensuring accessibility for all participants on a video call.

 

04. Avoid costly forensic validation & legal rework with tamper‑evident records

In a time when Sora creates highly realistic videos in a matter of seconds via a written prompt, the legitimacy of digital material is now going to be called into question more. This will require forensic analysis to prove authenticity of digital material, leading to delays in proceedings and challenges to admissibility. For interviews and meetings, the material can be edited to suggest a person said something they never did, and there would be no way of proving that the edited material is fake.

MeaConnexus and MeaFuse counteract this issue by applying advanced cryptography and blockchain technology to create a tamper-evident seal around all material. Whether it’s an interview/meeting on MeaConnexus or digital material on MeaFuse, there is verifiable provenance of all assets right from its point of capture or storage. This means that users can validate digital material and prove that what they see or hear is the original that was captured. This ultimately reduces reliance on third party validation or forensic analysis, by keeping all digital material written into blockchain.

 

05. Use existing devices & instant digital capture to cut hardware, media & admin costs

For a lot of businesses and organisations, cost saving is vital to continue operations, but in a time where specialist equipment is required, how can you save on financial costs? From hardware to capture digital material like cameras, dictaphones and body-worn cameras to hardware that stores the material like hard drives, USBs and memory cards, the cost of hardware quickly adds up. Not only this, but the devices need to be maintained, setup, and updated to keep pace with modern requirements.

MeaFuse is a web and mobile application which runs on iOS, Android, MacOS and Windows. You can capture photos, video, audio, web/social media pages and documents on your existing devices without having to purchase specialist equipment. MeaConnexus is a browser-based platform with no downloads required to use. Those joining the interview/meeting simply write their name before joining the call.

You can manage permissions within MeaFuse and MeaConnexus to share securely in groups and with specific users. As well as this, the media in both MeaFuse and MeaConnexus is stored in the cloud, so you don’t need to purchase external storage. And whenever you need to, you can download your digital material from the cloud. You can also record offline interviews/meetings with MeaFuse, which uploads it to the cloud once you are connected to the internet. This drastically reduces field kit costs, and produces an automatic transcription while writing the interview/meeting into blockchain to provide a tamper-evident seal around the material.

 

Lower cost. Higher integrity.

Deepfakes, disinformation and digital injection attacks will only get more advanced, cheaper to create and scalable. By building in resiliency from these threats from the start, you will save on costs in the long run, reducing legal challenge or delays in your workflow. Remote interviews, automated transcripts, real-time translation, automatic and verifiable provenance, and using your existing devices allows you to save on financial and resource costs. MeaConnexus and MeaFuse offer a tamper-evident suite to protect your digital material from its point of capture.

Read our latest MeaConnexus infographic which provides an idea of how much you can save if you conduct 500 interviews a year. Also, read our article on how to reduce the time spent investigating.