Digital Dictation Ain't Voice Recognition

By Delia Venables,  By John Gelagin, 

A few years ago, voice recognition was all the rage. Large crowds gathered around demonstrations of sales people reading text into a microphone and having the almost perfect transcription appearing on the screen. But this technology never took off.
It's taken a little while, but lawyers are starting to realise that not all dictation systems are the same. Everyone is familiar with tape based systems, but isn't digital dictation just the same as voice recognition? No! And lumping them together means you might be missing out on the very real benefits that digital dictation offers against the unfulfilled promises of voice recognition.

5 good things about digital dictation

1. Dictate like you're used to - into a small hand held device
2. Easier to edit your work
3. More flexible distribution of work.
4. Easier to prioritise jobs
5. No more lost tapes!

Digital dictation - what is it?

The great advantage of digital dictation is that the mainstay of legal activity - dictating into a small hand held device - has been retained. The lawyer can still sit back in his or her chair, wander around the room, gaze out of the window, leaf through papers and easily stop the system when the phone rings or a cup of coffee arrives. The lack of a down side, from the lawyer's point of view, is a key factor in the attraction of these systems.

Not only is the system not made harder, but an immediate improvement can be seen in that, because the file is digital, the recording can be edited by the lawyer before being sent to the secretary. It is also possible to indicate the priority of a particular document - something remarkably difficult to do with recordings stored sequentially on a traditional tape - and to log the progress of each particular document through the system.

The digital voice recording unit can either be linked directly to the PC or can be used independently from it, with data then transferred to the computer system as and when required.

Once in the system, the voice file is transferred to a specified location on the network. This is where the flexibility of the overall system is important - the location could be the lawyer's own secretary in the next room, it could be the lawyer's secretary working at home, it could be a departmental secretary down the corridor, it could be a group typing facility in the firm, it could be a secretary at another branch, or indeed it could be a transcription centre in India, sent via the internet. Whatever method is chosen, it is possible to use the available resources much more efficiently than where the physical location and availability of the secretary is the key (or only) factor.

Russel Godson from Lanier Voice observes that this is the biggest, immediate apparent benefit of digital dictation systems. "Control of the workflow goes immediately to those who are best placed and skilled to manage it - the administration staff"

The text is transcribed by secretaries in more or less the usual way and the prepared documents returned to the lawyer for final checking and printing out. In some systems, speech recognition can be utilised during the process of transcription, but in most cases, it is not.
In principle, this process can make much more efficient use of the support staff (and reduce the number of such staff) and also enable prime office locations to be use more intensively by lawyers, with the secretarial function carried out elsewhere.

and the cons

How do you keep the physical file with the dictation? Is it even necessary? This is seen as one of the biggest problem with these systems although the advantages of the system may well ultimately mean different ways of working with the file so that the physical file is not necessary. Case management and interfaces to other software can help with this, e.g. if the name and address can be picked up directly from the computer system, and if a user can see the history of the matter, the physical file may not be so necessary.

Does a secretary feel devalued as part of a "typing pool"? This can be a factor but there are advantages to counteract it, e.g. better quality of tape, flexibility of working location. In addition, work can be directed to a particular secretary if desired.

Is the technology only suitable for large firms? Although it is large firms who have been the first major implementers, there is really no barrier to its use by smaller firms. Indeed, smaller firms may make just as much use of the flexibility of the system (working from home, indicating priority of particular work, sharing resources between secretaries) than large firms. In addition, small firms are often able to make changes in their method of work more easily than large firms, as long as there is someone in the firm actively promoting the system. It seems likely that digital dictation will become a vital component of all IT systems in future, whatever the size of the firm.

Beyond the basics

There are even greater advantages if you integrate your dictation system with your other software systems. This enables you to, for example, pull in client details from the practice management database, take things in and out of a document management system easily and so on. Stephen McDermott from IBS InfoTech believes integration is a major advantage. "If every application integrates at each step, clients get most benefit."

Perhaps the most significant technological development has been by Quickscribe which has developed its own audio file type. Things start to get technical pretty quickly here so it's easiest to illustrate just what this means with an example. If you' re dictating a letter of advice to a client and need to include a chunk of text from a piece of legislation, at the moment you might do this by printing the legislation out, highlight the bit you want inserted and then dictate "insert the highlighted text from the hardcopy document headed Proceeds of Crime Act". Then when you give the tape to your secretary you have to remember to include that piece of paper, and, provided something doesn't get lost in the translation your secretary will copy type the text in.

With the IAF format it's a bunch easier. You simply highlight the relevant text on screen, press Insert and that piece of text will be automatically pasted in when your dictation is being transcribed.

The same can be done not just with text, but also images, slides from a Powerpoint presentation and so on.

Delia Venables is an independent computer consultant for lawyers based in the UK. An earlier version of this article first appeared on www.venables.co.uk/digitaldictation.htm She can be contacted at delia@venables.co.uk

John Gelagin can be contacted on john.gelagin@thomson.com.au

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