"Voice dictation tools helpful, but still have kinks"
I'm taking the Canadian legal press by force:
...
Productivity is, of course, the main attraction. But litigator Maxwell Kennerly discourages people from using traditional measures of productivity to evaluate these tools.
“If you simply ran a stopwatch and compared how long it took to dictate and correct a document versus simply typing it, voice recognition doesn’t seem much faster and, indeed, is sometimes slower,” wrote Kennerly of the Philadelphia, Pa.-based, Beasley Firm LLC in an e-mail. “The critical difference is fatigue. After I type a document, I usually feel tired and unwilling to move on to my next task. Voice recognition software dramatically reduces that fatigue.
“The difference is often greatest at the end of the day. Instead of leaving your office with pain in your hands, wrists, and forearms, you leave feeling productive and ready to go back the next day.”...
Kennerly added the following advice: “For improving performance in daily use, the question is not if you can get 100 per cent accuracy, because you usually will not,” he wrote. “But rather if you can adapt to checking and correcting the words on the page as they appear, which you normally do not do when typing.
“For me, adaptation took about a week of frustration, after which I fell into a groove,” he said.
Kennerly’s experience led him to the following conclusion: “Voice recognition is not for the computer illiterate,” he wrote. “You need some computer savvy to use it effectively, since your performance depends on your ability to quickly detect and correct errors, your ability to enable the more robust features of the program, and most importantly, your general comfort level with technology.”
See the linked article by Luigi Benetton at The Lawyers Weekly from more.
I have never used this type of software before. Does it work if you use a portable digital dictation device and then play it back for Dragon, or do you have to be at your computer to use it? Or is there some other way to dictate remotely and then use later with the voice-recognition software?
Tom -- it does indeed work if you use a portable digital dictation device and then play it back for Dragon. I use an Olympus DS-4000 and it couldn't be easier; I connect the Olympus, the dictation software comes up, and it has a built in "Voice Recognition" tab that automatically recognized I had Dragon NaturallySpeaking. A click or two later and it goes on autopilot, transcribing the whole thing.