This roundtable discussion focused on the use of speech recognition technology and how it was being used or could be used to improve general working practices. There was a particular focus on Dragon, a speech recognition technology, used by law firms to improve their services.
The discussion was chaired by Liz Halifax-Smith, the senior Dragon sales manager in the UK and Ireland for Nuance Communications and John Bendall at Crescendo. The roundtable was attended by several IT professionals working within the legal sector.
It was acknowledged among the group how useful this technology could be in time saving and freeing up secretaries from transcription work.
“What I prefer about speech recognition compared with dictation is that you can see the words coming up and use voice commands to move things around if need be,” said one IT expert.
One participant noted their company had previously attempted to integrate voice recognition technology, but that it hadn’t taken well as it had not been very accurate and wasted more time sorting out transcriptions. This highlighted the potential issues with the technology.
“What we’ve seen is people moving away from digital dictation and producing documents quicker than they can type,” noted Bendall. He continued: “The new features built into Dragon allow you to see how much people are using it and what functions and features they’re using”. One of the benefits of this comes from the AI capabilities. “The more people log on, the better the system gets and this improves the engine itself”.
Another issue was raised by an IT manager. “We’ve got the desktop version and the accuracy was great, but the biggest issue was that it left a large footprint.” They added: “It would slow down computers and people would have to reboot all the time, so we investigated the Cloud solution and it’s great”.
There appeared to be some reservations among the professionals at the firms represented to use the Cloud and in fact the speech recognition software at all. “I think only about 25 people use it at the moment and there appears a reluctance among some staff. I think if they just used it and saw how useful it can be people would get onboard” suggested one participant.
“This is actually why we were keen on the Cloud version, the individual licensing meant people who want to can use it and those who don’t, don’t have to,” replied another IT manager.
The conversation moved on to the application of Dragon and speech recognition technologies. Halifax-Smith sited a survey by Nuance which highlighted “80 per cent of those surveyed admitted administrative tasks frequently or some of the time increased their stress levels.” She continued: “Do you think speech recognition would increase productivity and document turnaround and therefore potentially decrease stress levels?”
Answering this, one participant mentioned: “We wanted to move our secretaries away from just sitting at their desk typing and move them more into administrative work, billing and things which is why we thought Nuance would be a good idea.”
“I think I need to do a bit of business analysis and see who is doing a lot of typing, which is very text heavy because it could then benefit them the most,” replied another expert.
The conversation then turned to the pandemic. Earlier in the discussion one participant mentioned: “As we’re all working from home, we thought we’d try it again. People came up with great ideas, you can have a phone call with a client and open up a memo template and everything you say on the call gets recorded”.
“One of the benefits of the Cloud solution is that employees can access the files and speech recognition and add to it regardless of where they’re situated,” noted Halifax-Smith. “Do you think that would have any financial benefits or anything you’re reluctant about?”
In response, Bendall mentioned: “Speech to text is one part of the product which is extremely accurate, but what we typically find is other parts of the system like voice navigation are useful,[…] we’re always asking what takes you a long time, and then finding commands to solve this.”
“Our trust and compliance unit has grown due to GDPR and other regulations. We were able to say to a secretary do you want to go and work in another department? We could hire internally because we’d freed up secretarial duties. We’d like to be able to do this more with Nuance”, mentioned one IT manager.
“We’ll always need secretaries, we want our lawyers to do memos and emails themselves, I’d say 70 per cent of what goes through digital dictation is memos and emails, freeing up secretaries to do longer documents,” noted one attendee.
“We’ve just launched Dragon Legal Anywhere, which comes with its own specific legal vocabulary, which would help with that,” noted Halifax-Smith.
“Also, with the business centre, you can set up new users with word lists previous users have used, which may not have been in the dictionary,” added Bendall.
The roundtable finished with a discussion on the software’s ability to aid people with specific issues. “Could it help someone with something like dyslexia?” asked one participant.
“It absolutely could, the way the software works, it doesn’t look at what you’ve said anymore, it drops down and looks at what you’re trying to say. With the processing power in the Cloud, the accuracy has improved so much so it looks at the words either side to understand the whole sentence”, explained Bendall.
“Outside of the legal context, there’s a disabled students initiative catering to students with specific needs and through that you can receive a grant. We’ve done studies with students and adults with dyslexia and Dragon has revolutionised their entire working day” said Halifax-Smith.
This highlights the usefulness and potential applications of speech recognition technology in the legal sector and beyond.
