Many people say the term ‘voice recognition,’ however, the correct terminology is to say, ‘speech recognition.’ Voice recognition attempts to recognize your actual voice instead of the actual words that are spoken. While, speech recognition is a system that recognizes the speech pattern and turns your spoken words directly into text.
When people hear the term speech recognition, you automatically think voice dialing on your cell phone. Instead of actually typing in the phone number, you command the phone to, “Call Home” and it will.
The technology however, has further diversified to several applications in healthcare, military, people with disabilities, videos games, transcription, etc.
As the healthcare industry continues to make drastic changes, you will see more and more providers replacing their transcriptionists with speech recognition software. Many practices are trying to cut costs, and a simple way to do this is to use speech recognition in the front-end.
However, as transcriptionists are becoming more concerned of this new technology, they are trying to use it to their benefit. Several are beginning to use the software to edit original voice files.
In addition, with the constant talk of EHRs, many providers will find that they can be more effective using their EHR in conjunction with speech recognition software solutions. Sometimes, it is just faster to navigate by voice as opposed to using a keyboard and mouse.
