system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
eli5: Why is stenography still used in courtrooms when microphones exist?

It seems like it would be much easier to just set up a microphone and record everything that's being said in a legal setting rather than having someone type it out.

edit: This is in no way meant to discredit stenography or those who practice it.
gpt
A transcript is an undisputed record of what occurred during a legal proceeding.  During a proceeding the parties can and frequently do have the transcript read back to make sure that everyone is in agreement with what was said.  If they're not in agreement then they can correct the transcript right then, when the substance of what was said is fresh in everybody's mind.  This is particularly important because people frequently misspeak and say one thing even though they meant another - which is something that is easy to correct on the transcript if its caught at the time that it was said.

An audio recording is not an undisputed record - even if no one misspoke, people can hear the exact same audio and come away with two completely different understandings of what was said.  Before you used an audio recording as evidence of what was said during a proceeding you would first need to reduce it to writing so that you could have an undisputed record.  

That's much more difficult to do when no one remembers exactly what was said because this is being done months or years later.  Ultimately you would need an entirely new trial with an entirely new jury to listen to expert testimony and determine what was said during the original proceeding.  Rather than dealing with that, the court just appoints a neutral expert, IE, a stenographer, to transcribe the proceeding as its happening.  The court then gives the parties a limited, non-appealable window to check and correct the transcript.  Once that window is closed the parties can no longer dispute what happened during the proceeding, which prevents a tremendous amount of needless litigation.