ConnectIT e-news Daily 14-September-2004

ScanSoft serves up Dragon NaturallySpeaking SDK

by Mark Riehl

For years ScanSoft has been delivering its Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition solution on desktop computers, but now the software can sit on a server.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking for desktop computers has been available in one form or another since the early 1990s. The Peabody, Mass.-based speech and imaging solutions vendor is now offering Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7 Software Development Kit (SDK) Server Edition.

"We had many requests particularly in the healthcare markets for this new type of functionality because physicians are historically extensive dictators, but of course those dictations were processed manually by human transcriptionists who would listen to recordings and type them out," said Matt Revis, senior product marketing manager for dictation products at ScanSoft. "That is a very time intensive and expensive proposition. Bringing the power of speech recognition can both lower the costs and turnaround time of creating a physician's patient encounter notes."

The new SDK supports server-based speech recognition of recorded dictation and is designed to increase productivity and lower costs in healthcare and other transcription intensive markets.

"There is a substantial percentage of the population in corporations, hospitals, law firms that either because they are reluctant to change or don't like technology, are uncomfortable talking to a computer and would prefer to be able to dictate into a telephone or recording device as they always have, but their organizations still want to be able to leverage the power of speech recognition," Revis said.

The server-based speech recognition SDK enables users to either speaking into a telephone, digital recorder or some other voice capture device and run that through a speech recognition engine on a server somewhere. One benefit is that the user does not need to go through an upfront voice training procedure or learn special commands as they would have to with the desktop version.

Transcriptionists will have the ability to receive an automatically generated draft report, which they can simply edit and can increase transcriptionist productivity rates by 50 per cent or more.

The SDK Server Edition is available from transcription service organizations, healthcare ISVs, and systems integrators, to be integrated into clinical documentation systems.