What a Truthring verification report is
A number on a screen convinces the person who ran the check and nobody else. The report exists for the second reader: the editor, the fraud analyst, the solicitor on the other side, the panel member who was not there.
A verification report is a dated document about a single file. It names the engine version, gives the verdict and its confidence, describes the observations behind the conclusion in ordinary language, publishes the false positive rate for that class of recording, and states what the result cannot establish. It is built to be examined by somebody who would rather it were wrong.
No report has been issued. Truthring has not launched and nothing has been analysed. The document linked below is a specimen: an invented example, marked as one on every screen, published early because a format is easier to criticise than a promise. If you have received something in this format from anybody, it did not come from a completed analysis.
What goes into one
Nine parts, in a fixed order, so that two reports about different recordings can be compared without hunting for the equivalent paragraph.
- Document details. The Ringmark, the issue date, the methodology version, and the entity that issued it. A verdict is only interpretable against the model that produced it, and models are retrained as new generators appear.
- The file examined. Name, container and codec, duration, sample rate, channel count, and how the submitter says it reached them. That last item is recorded as an account, never as a finding.
- The assessment. One of three states with a confidence figure, and a sentence saying what lowered that confidence.
- Signals observed. Plain language, no feature names, nothing proprietary. A reader who cannot follow the reasoning cannot weigh it.
- The false positive rate for that audio condition. Printed on the report, not buried on a marketing page.
- Limitations of that specific result. Written for the individual clip. Boilerplate here would defeat the purpose.
- Privacy. What happened to the recording, what survives, and for how long.
- Verification. How a recipient confirms the document is ours. [VERIFY: verification mechanism not built]
- Actions. Sharing and export, once they exist.
The order is deliberate. Limitations come before the actions rather than after them, because a reader who has stopped reading should have reached the caveats first.
What a report is not
Three misunderstandings do most of the damage in this category, and it is cheaper to head them off here than to correct them later.
It is not proof. A verdict is a probability produced by a method with a published error rate. Print it, frame it, attach it to a filing: it remains a probability. Nobody should be accused, dismissed or charged on the strength of one, and our compliance page says so at greater length because it is the failure mode that hurts real people.
It is not custody of your evidence. Truthring examines a file and then deletes it. If a recording matters to a live dispute, keep the original yourself, in storage you control, with a note of where it came from and who has touched it. The report identifies what we looked at; it does not preserve it on your behalf.
It is not backed by a certification. No auditor has examined our controls or our evaluation method. There is no SOC 2 report and no ISO 27001 certificate anywhere in Lacewing Technologies. A report carries a dated method and a stated error rate, and that is the entirety of what stands behind it. Security and transparency both repeat this rather than leaving it to be inferred.
Who ends up asking for one
The pattern is consistent across the people who have described the problem to us. Somebody runs a check, gets an answer, and then discovers that the answer is the easy part. A newsroom will not publish on a screenshot. A bank’s fraud team needs something that survives an internal review. A disciplinary panel has to show the employee what it relied on. A court asks who produced the analysis and how often that method is wrong.
Each of those readers is asking the same question in a different vocabulary: can I check this myself, or am I being asked to take your word for it? A report is our answer, and the reason it prints the unflattering number alongside the conclusion. The broader argument for verifiable audio results sits on audio verification, and the practical steps for somebody holding a suspicious clip right now are on verifying a suspicious recording.
See the format
The specimen is a complete, filled-in example with invented values throughout. It carries a banner on every screen saying what it is, and it is excluded from search engines so that a fabricated report cannot surface in a query about a real one.
Do not circulate the specimen as evidence of anything. It describes no recording and no person.
Questions about reports
Has Truthring ever issued a report?
No. The product has not launched, no member of the public has submitted a recording, and no report exists. The only document in this format anywhere on the site is a specimen, clearly labelled and kept out of search indexes, published so the format can be reviewed in advance.
What is the difference between a score and a report?
A score is a number with nothing attached. A report carries the method version that produced the number, the false positive rate for that class of audio, the observations that drove the conclusion in language a non-specialist can follow, and an explicit statement of what may not be inferred. The second can be handed to somebody who disagrees with you.
Will a report be accepted in court?
Admissibility is decided by the court, applying its own rules, and no vendor can promise it. What a report can do is arrive with the things a court usually wants: a named method, a stated error rate, a version number, and candid limits. Keep your own original recording and your own chain of custody regardless.
Does a report include the audio?
No. The commitment is that audio is erased once analysis finishes and a one-way hash is kept in its place, so the report stands on its own and a file somebody else holds can still be matched to the analysis. That decision, and what it costs, is set out on the retention page.
What will a report cost?
Pricing is not settled and no plan is on sale. Anyone quoting a figure for a Truthring report today is quoting something that does not exist yet.
The numbers behind a verdict
Trust
Reviewed