VIQ Solutions Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Today, we are hosting a conference call to discuss the 2023 fourth quarter and full year financial results for VIQ Solutions, Inc. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. For those that dialed in, should you require any assistance during the call, please press star then zero on your touchtone phone. For questions and answers regarding recent disclosures or any other matter, please reach out directly to the company using the contact details on the company website. Your host for today is Audrey Liu, Corporate Finance Controller for VIQ. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to VIQ Solutions' 2023 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Results Conference Call. Before we begin, I would like to point out that certain statements made on today's call contain forward-looking information subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors. For a complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties facing VIQ, we refer you to the company's MD&A and other continuous disclosure filings, which are available on CDAR at cdar.com. As a reminder, all dollar amounts are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise stated. With us today, we have Sebastian Paré, CEO, Susan Sumner, President and COO, and Alexi Edwards, CFO of VIQ. I will now turn the call over to Sebastian Paré to begin.

Thank you, André. Welcome, everyone, to our fourth quarter of 2024 earning calls. I would like to call 2023 the year of tearing the way forward to 2024. While the year's results reflect the challenges of the year, Q4 represents the way forward to our return to positive EBITDA in 2024. This progression was not a small feat. We pulled through the remaining legacy of the pandemic with capacity adjustments that rebounded in Q4. We committed and executed aggressive cutting measures to meet our commitments to positive EBITDA. We began AI migrations in late 2023 to meet our commitment to increase productivity and gross margin attainment in Australia to be consistent with other regions globally. All of this while ensuring that we remain fully committed to preserving and growing profitable revenue and continuing to invest in innovation that protect our competitiveness advantage in our core segments. with particular focus on technologies that are disruptive in the courts, law firms and legal, insurance, and criminal justice space. We're particularly excited about the market penetration for our SaaS product, First Draft. Everyone can route an audio and video file into a speech-to-text. Yet, speech-to-text is a very small step in our AI workflow. You need a lot more intelligence and continuous supervised learnings with human experts built in to bring sophisticated multi-speaker first act products to meet the market demands of stringent legal requirements for evidence purposes for our clients. Our clients rely on documentation recorded and produced by VIQ for a range of legal activities, including interviews, testimonies, depositions, trial, litigation, and settlement. Our unique domain-specific language models Alongside our post-processing roles engines per industry, by region, and recently by customer, I've evolved leaps and bounds with the volume that have been migrated in 2023 that are now flowing to the platform globally 24-7. This is partially what we mean by technologies that are disruptive in the court, legal, insurance, and criminal justice space. We enable our clients to be more productive and more responsive to the evolving needs of their complex clients who value accuracy. Our entire industry has been challenged with growth during the pandemic and the year that followed. Our industry is adapting to emerging AI technologies and the unavoidable catch-up that the government entities that we're dealing with. Following the annual court recess seasonality late December and early January in the United Kingdom in Australia, February results, while not a long runway, will likely bring in further evidence to the markets that the company actions from 2023, both cost reductions and productivity gains, alongside a steadier revenue post-pandemic and net new bookings, are gradually reshaping favorably the financial foundation of VIQ going forward in 2024, at a time when the addressable market is growing much faster than our customers can handle to their legacy manual workflow. Capital markets, particularly in the micro-cap space, have certainly shown volatility, but we're very proud that despite market headwinds, we were able to close successfully a private placement, which ended up being oversubscribed. It was made possible through the support of many tech AI savvy investors alongside my partners, Beatty, who took a hard look at the company progression towards positive EBITDA in 2024, alongside latest industry trends and the results. Their support reaffirmed their commitment to VIQ and is a testament to the belief that we're off to a very strong 2024. We have remained focused on our two main core objectives. requiring to emerge in 2024. Number one, yielding the results of the cost reductions, and number two, an accelerated return to profitability. We're very pleased to say that our results in Q1 of 2024 will likely show the results of that focus is on track. And now I will turn it over to Susan Sumner for the operational updates. Susan?