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I have conflicting anecdotes: 1. it's used heavily and successfully in medical dictation situations, ie medical professionals dictating case notes. 2. I was so

by tjpick 16y ago

I have conflicting anecdotes: 1. it's used heavily and successfully in medical dictation situations, ie medical professionals dictating case notes. 2. I was so excited about speech control in OSX, and I tried it, and it was shit because I had to speak with a terrible impression of an American accent to get it to do anything.

robertfortner 16y ago
I'd say they aren't really conflicting. Commercial speech recognition really started in the medical field. Accuracy is much higher with a controlled vocabulary. Speaker-specific characteristics, e.g. accent, by contrast are much harder for recognizers.
cwinters 16y ago
Medical dictation is a success for recognition, but it's important to remember that no such system can function by itself. Instead, they're often advertised as making the human transcriptionist's job easier -- reducing the number and type of fixes a human has to make when correcting the dictation results.
mkramlich 16y ago
Interesting about it being used heavily and "successfully" in the medical field. That's the one field where I'd want 100% transcription perfection. Mistakes there could kill.
- barrkel 16y ago
  It could hardly be worse than doctor's handwriting...
kowen 16y ago
I paid my way through college doing medical transcription. Throughout my time there, the hospital was experimenting with speech recognition, but the success rate was very low, and the doctors spent a lot of time going over and correcting the output. I believe they finally ditched the voice recognition software (though I do not know for sure). I'm guessing that the reason the experiment failed at this hospital is that the language was non-English. In addition, most of the doctors were foreign, speaking with wildly differing accents. Also, many of the doctors would mix two languages when dictating, in addition to the usual Latin terms. Basically, it was easier to just pay some humans to parse it.
- tjpick 16y ago
  the ones where it is successful invest quite a bit into training the software and the doctors use macros heavily.
jessriedel 16y ago
My anecdotal evidence from a surgeon in the family is that the medical dictation is still very bad. His practice of 4 doctors spent a bunch of money on Dragon, fought with it for a month, and then went back to old-fashioned human dictation.
- tjpick 16y ago
  from what I remember, you might be right that Dragon is not that great, PowerScribe is the one I remember being more popular -- I was doing RIS (Radiology Information System) work at the time about a year ago.

by tjpick 16y ago

robertfortner 16y ago

I'd say they aren't really conflicting. Commercial speech recognition really started in the medical field. Accuracy is much higher with a controlled vocabulary. Speaker-specific characteristics, e.g. accent, by contrast are much harder for recognizers.

cwinters 16y ago

Medical dictation is a success for recognition, but it's important to remember that no such system can function by itself. Instead, they're often advertised as making the human transcriptionist's job easier -- reducing the number and type of fixes a human has to make when correcting the dictation results.

mkramlich 16y ago

Interesting about it being used heavily and "successfully" in the medical field. That's the one field where I'd want 100% transcription perfection. Mistakes there could kill.

barrkel 16y ago
It could hardly be worse than doctor's handwriting...

kowen 16y ago

I paid my way through college doing medical transcription. Throughout my time there, the hospital was experimenting with speech recognition, but the success rate was very low, and the doctors spent a lot of time going over and correcting the output. I believe they finally ditched the voice recognition software (though I do not know for sure). I'm guessing that the reason the experiment failed at this hospital is that the language was non-English. In addition, most of the doctors were foreign, speaking with wildly differing accents. Also, many of the doctors would mix two languages when dictating, in addition to the usual Latin terms. Basically, it was easier to just pay some humans to parse it.

tjpick 16y ago
the ones where it is successful invest quite a bit into training the software and the doctors use macros heavily.

jessriedel 16y ago

My anecdotal evidence from a surgeon in the family is that the medical dictation is still very bad. His practice of 4 doctors spent a bunch of money on Dragon, fought with it for a month, and then went back to old-fashioned human dictation.

tjpick 16y ago
from what I remember, you might be right that Dragon is not that great, PowerScribe is the one I remember being more popular -- I was doing RIS (Radiology Information System) work at the time about a year ago.