One of Dragon’s abilities beyond being able to instantly transcribe voice to text using its cutting edge speech recognition and language models is automatic transcription. It’s good to be able to dictate when you’re in front of your computer, but what about when you’re out and about? Being able to jot down a quick note, capture on-site documentation, doing ward rounds at the hospital or site inspections… this can be an invaluable reporting tool. Gone are the days where you need to take copious notes, use shorthand to speed up the recording of your findings only to try to decipher them back at the office.
Besides skipping over important details, misrecognising your quick handwriting notes or having to recapture the information by transcribing it by hand, it can be a laborious process and complicated even further if your physical notes go missing. While many professionals in this situation will rely on a tablet device with a check box style document, sometimes this isn’t enough. The devil is in the details and often you need a Dragon to prevent this administrative aspect to the job from becoming a burden.
While some professionals use a digital recorder to capture their findings, it’s only half the job done. From this point, you could hand it over to someone else to transcribe, but this can be a problem when dealing with confidential matters. Moreover, your first draft often needs reworking and the back-and-forth between you and your transcriptionist can become more trouble than simply typing the document itself.
A digital recorder makes sense for some professionals who want to compartmentalise their work. While you can record on a smartphone quite easily, audio at a high quality does take up a considerable amount of space. You can also upload the audio recording to a cloud drive, upload and send via email or transfer in batches via Bluetooth. The magic of a smartphone is that it’s already geared towards doing all of this with a high-quality microphone and wi-fi capabilities, making sharing simple. Digital recorders do come with wi-fi capabilities and being designed for one purpose are perfectly positioned for recording.
Slide switches for easy recording make them useful. Having storage dedicated to voice recordings only also makes sense. Being able to dock them in their cradle for charging or file transfer also helps. Smartphones are usually more convenient because we tend to keep them close. Being able to jot down a few notes for Dragon while waiting for a meeting in the car just means you can get stuff done wherever. It really comes down to your personal style and requirements. For some, it could make sense to use both as inputs. For others, wanting to keep the boundaries in place it could make sense to buy an additional phone (no SIM required) and turn it into a recording device and back up phone.
Get in touch with us to discuss how we can integrate a device and automatic transcription system into your current work flow. You can do it all yourself and become independent or leverage your support staff in the process with your profile on their PC to free up more time to focus on your work.