Software gives dictaphone users and slow typists the hurry-up

Intellectual property law firm Baldwin Shelston Waters is installing voice recognition software to remedy slow typing and dictaphone dependency among its staff.



Grant Crowley, the firm's chief executive officer, said the software was improving the effectiveness of authors and support staff in the firm (authors are those staff who have traditionally generated documents using dictaphones).

After a year-long trial the firm is rolling out the system to around 60 of the its 180 staff, using Dragon Naturally Speaking software from Auckland's Speech Recognition of New Zealand.

Crowley said document turn-around time had been reduced, releasing secretarial staff for more productive value-added work. The software costs about $3000 a user.

The firm had found it could push more work through when staff worked directly on screen, rather than by dictating, chasing and correcting paper, which had to go backwards and forwards between the author and the support team.



All of the personal computers running the software have a high-powered P4 chip running at least 1.6 GHz with about 512MB of memory.

Mark Johnstone, the firm's IT director, said the real benefits came when staff had learned all the commands such as bold or underline.

He said it was not a silver bullet, more like a very good tool to help authors become more productive.

"It works best when used in conjunction with the mouse and keyboard."

The software was specific to each user, who works at a dedicated PC which is "trained" to recognise the author's voice.