Why SME law firms need to embrace real-time speech recognition

Kim Williams, product manager, digital dictation at Advanced, says technology has now advanced to the point where all firms should unequivocally embrace real-time speech recognition.

In the beginning, there was dictation to a secretary, then on to a 30-min tape, and now to digital devices, such as your mobile phone. And as digital dictation has developed, so too has speech recognition technology. It means that many firms now dispatch dictated digital recordings to a back-end speech recognition engine that turns speech into text. This is fairly efficient, but, increasingly, there’s a much better option.

Technology has now advanced to the point where all firms should unequivocally embrace real-time speech recognition. What happens is that the text is created as the lawyer dictates. So, users get an instant reassurance that they’re being heard accurately. But more to the point, using the right software enables documents to be created near instantaneously – resulting in significant time and cost savings and raised client service levels. These bring very good news in the current climate, when firms are having to find efficiencies wherever possible.

Of course, like every new technology, real-time speech recognition has gone through a developmental curve. Previous incarnations may have been relatively slow and required a powerful PC in order to get the best results. But today’s most advanced legal speech recognition applications, like ours, removes these barriers and are astoundingly efficient. For instance, you can dictate into any template on any platform. Letters and contracts can be produced at the speed of speech – which is three times faster than typing.

Users need to undertake around an hour’s training in giving the software commands that will format the dictation. After that, it’s a matter of the software ‘learning’ your speech patterns and accent. Of course, bespoke legal speech recognition tools, already know and understand legal vocabulary and context. As a result, users can quickly achieve almost 100% accuracy. Plus the tool can be accessed on any device, at any time, from any location.

The advantages are clear. Lawyers gain great flexibility to work remotely; transcription costs are reduced; a great burden is lifted from support staff; work is turned around much more quickly. More than ever, firms need to carve out a competitive advantage. This supplies a huge one.