Guided redaction in Tonic Textual: Human-precision, streamlined by AI

The last mile of redaction, solved

Across government teams, legal departments, and highly regulated industries like healthcare and banking, redaction workflows have remained stubbornly manual even as AI transforms how sensitive information is detected. Automated tools speed up the initial pass, but the final step still requires human judgment. For many organizations, that last mile is the slowest and most error-prone part of the process.

Today, we are introducing Guided Redaction, a new capability in Tonic Textual that blends AI-powered auto-redaction with a structured and collaborative human review workflow. Guided Redaction helps teams finalize redactions faster, document their decisions for compliance, and export fully audit-ready results at scale.

This workflow is designed for de-classification and information request handling, legal redaction, regulated enterprise processes, and any scenario where accuracy and traceability matter.

Why we built Guided Redaction

When the work involves sensitive information and real consequences, automation alone isn’t enough. Customers told us they needed a workflow that adds thoughtful human oversight to three critical challenges.

1. Confidence that no sensitive information slips through

The cost of a single missed redaction can be enormous. Guided Redaction gives redactors full control. They can refine AI detections, turn off unnecessary entity types, and manually redact large blocks, images, or entire pages when needed.

2. Faster processing of complex document sets

FOIA offices and enterprise privacy teams often handle documents that range from a few pages to thousands. They needed bulk actions, intelligent search, and workflows designed for scale. Guided Redaction delivers all three.

3. A defensible audit trail without the spreadsheets

Compliance requires justification and collaboration requires traceability. Guided Redaction tracks every edit, comment, status change, and export step automatically.

Guided Redaction creates a unified interface for both manual and automated redaction workflow. 

Most tools force teams to choose between AI-driven redaction and fully manual redaction. Textual combines both approaches so you get the speed of models and the certainty of human review.

What Guided Redaction enables

AI-powered detection with human refinement

Guided Redaction uses Textual’s detection models to automatically identify content that is likely to be sensitive, giving teams a strong first pass before any manual work begins. From there, redactors can refine or remove these suggestions, turn entity types on or off, or apply completely manual redactions wherever needed. This hybrid workflow keeps the speed benefits of automation while allowing humans to apply the judgment that models cannot capture on their own.

Manual redaction for text, images, and full pages

Many real-world redaction workflows require more than masking individual fields. Guided Redaction lets users redact entire paragraphs, pages, or even complex image regions with simple point-and-click tools. Whether the task involves blocking out long narrative sections or drawing boxes over signatures and handwritten notes, the UI supports the way redactors already work.

Collaboration through comments and status tracking

Redaction is rarely a one-person job. Guided Redaction includes inline commenting, customizable statuses, and clearly defined document views for editing, reviewing, and previewing. Redactors and reviewers can work in parallel, resolve questions quickly, and maintain visibility into the progress of large projects. The structured workflow reduces bottlenecks and helps teams avoid rework.

Comprehensive audit logging

Reviews and redactions are automatically tracked, with timestamps and associated users recorded in exportable logs. This creates a complete and defensible history of how a document was processed, which is essential for organizations that must demonstrate compliance or oversight. 

Output designed for operational scale

Once redactions are complete, Guided Redaction produces flattened PDFs that preserve visual consistency and performance across large documents. Users can choose the appearance of redactions, decide whether to export files individually or combined, and generate outputs that meet the needs of both internal workflows and external requests. The system is built to support projects with thousands of files and documents that may span hundreds of pages.

Unlocking the future of redaction

AI has transformed the early stages of redaction by rapidly identifying sensitive content. The final stage, however, has remained tedious and slow. Guided Redaction closes this gap and gives teams a workflow that is faster, more accurate, and fully compliant.

If your team handles sensitive documents and needs both speed and certainty, schedule a demo with an expert or start a free trial of Tonic Textual to try out Guided Redaction today.