Fable
The counter that only listens to words begins to miss the truth
The insurance claims hall originally accepted only forms. Customers wrote down what happened, and claims adjusters judged liability, loss, and next-step materials from the text.
Later, customers began uploading photos, dashcam clips, repair recordings, and chat screenshots. Forms were still important, but the truth was often hidden in the corner of an image or the first few seconds of a video. The hall's old system could only read text. Staff had no choice but to ask customers to describe what was in the photos and write explanations of what was in the videos. Customers couldn't write clearly, and claims adjusters couldn't see the full picture.
The supervisor first added a rule: all non-text materials must be manually transcribed. The queue immediately grew longer, and transcription often missed key details, such as crack locations, light colors, and tone of voice.
The new system did not compress everything into text. It treated text, images, video, audio and structured fields as parts of the case, letting the assistant read and compare them within the same workflow.
In a disputed case, the customer's text said “the equipment shut down normally,” but the video showed a red light flashing, and in the repair recording the engineer mentioned that the previous patch was not completed. Only by combining the three signals was the judgment complete.
The claims adjuster realized that multimodality is not about adding a few more upload entry points, but about letting different forms of evidence participate together in reasoning, retrieval and decision-making. The system also set boundaries: low-confidence visual recognition must request human review; audio transcription involving privacy must be de-identified; structured fields and raw evidence must be consistent and traceable.
The claims supervisor first added staff and transcribed all image content into text. The queue grew longer, and details were still lost in transcription: the direction of cracks, reflections on rainy nights, the hesitation in braking sounds—none could be written on paper. Later the hall got a new counter. The counter could view tables, photos, clips, and recordings at the same time, but each type of material was labeled with its source, and important judgments still had to be reviewed by a claims adjuster.
A small car crash case changed everyone's view. The text said "minor scrape," but the corner of the photo revealed a broken child seat buckle. Listen to only one kind of material, and the truth will be missing a side. In the end, the hall replaced that old slogan: as long as the form is filled out completely, that's enough. Real business is never a single format.