"I started using speech recognition for a simple reason. I hate to type," says Scott Hagen, vice-president of The Mechanic's Bank in Walnut Creek, California. "I constantly use the computer in my job, but with the keyboard, I was never as fast as I'd like. I write credit evaluations all day. I've always felt that I would rather dictate than pound on the keyboard. After I'd completed the initial training, the program started working well for me with dictation almost immediately. It took me just a few days to get used to the commands." George Morrison retired in 1981, before computers were common equipment in executive suites. That's why he never had to learn to type. He says, "I had to read computer-generated reports, but actually to handle a computer, well, I hadn't touched one until my wife gave me one seven years ago for our 50th anniversary. I wasn't sure I needed a computer, but my wife couldn't think of anything else I needed, I guess, so she got me one! I'm glad she did, although she hears me cussing at the thing once in a while." George didn't start using speech recognition right away. His friend Tom, who he met through CompuServe, introduced him to it, "and I thought it was pretty neat." He's now on his third computer, one he bought especially to use with speech recognition because he found his previous computer was too slow. He admits that learning to use the program well requires more work than he thought at first. However, he says, "I've never felt intimidated by the thing. I've been pretty much self trained. If I have a major problem, I just call up Tom and he straightens me right out." Bruce's tone of voice is what you might expect for a securities lawyer: measured, dry, quiet, precise. You hear his voice, and you expect a man who thinks carefully before he speaks. When Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software was released in 1997, he was one of the first to buy and install it. What was his experience? He says in the same even tone, daring disbelief, "It's fabulous. The best piece of software ever written... It was pretty much usable right out of the box after I did the training routine." When asked to offer advice for people considering buying speech recognition programs, his voice becomes animated. "Just do it! I can't understand why everyone doesn't do it." Bruce admits, though, that "you have to understand how the program works, how it thinks, how the correction routine works, in order to make it work most effectively. And that isn't really obvious to most users. Most users don't give enough thought to how they train it.. The program is pretty good out of the box but it's only really as good as you train it." Using dictation software has "vastly improved my productivity," says Bruce, "I draft briefs three times faster now. But where my dictation software really shines is in document review. I can work in a different way now, really, because I can read documents and find portions that are interesting. I then just dictate the interesting portions directly into my database, and there I have it, captured, coded, and ready to use. "It's pretty inefficient for a lawyer to type large sections of a document into a computer. Lawyers have to read the documents anyway; it takes only seconds to read in the full paragraph, and then I can just plug it into a database, and I'm done. That's by far the greatest speed enhancement. I don't have to edit or think in-between. I work in a totally different way." |
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