The Evolution of Voice Recognition Essay Example for Free

The Evolution of Voice Recognition Essay Aw the Dictaphone! What an extraordinary invention. This device has been used to record spoken notes of medical professionals to be transcribed at a later date for over a century. The Dictaphone has truly been an icon in the health care industry and will be missed. Since its invention health care has underwent so many changes and introduced so many technological advances. To follow suit the way in which medical notes are recorded and stored must too undergo change. And so it did. There has been skepticism along the way however, voice or speech recognition is beginning to be more accepted and widely used in the health care field. Voice recognition software was developed to produce text from spoken words. Instead of typing the words a computer user only needed to talk to the computer, and the text is typed by a program which is integrated into the software. Voice recognition was being experimented with by the government agencies for over six decades however, did not become reality in the public until the last two decades of the 20th century. This new technology allowed the user to enter comments or commands without keyboard functions or a mouse. This was truly hands free (Parente, Kock, Sonsini, 2004). The mid 1990s finally brought the induction of voice recognition into the health care industry. Many doctors feared the use of this new technology and others disbelieved the capabilities which prevented them from using the system. The vocabulary of the technology lacked the sophistication which would be required for its purpose. This program required the user to adapt to its capabilities instead of the program adapting to the user; this was backward to how the program would ideally work. Having a cold or an accent made the technology quite difficult to use. Computers were slower at processing information during this time in technological history; this made the problem worse. With the early version of voice recognition it was sometimes hard to tell the difference â€Å"between background noise and the user’s speech† and the technology was much less than cost effective. The system generally started at â€Å"$27,000 per workstation† (Parente et al. , 2004, Historical Development of Speech-Recognition Technology, para 6). The voice recognition system would be improved upon and become an important part of the technology used in hospitals today. A wider understanding of medical vocabulary would be important for doctors to hold any faith in the system. Improvements were indeed made over time. †Accuracy rates rose dramatically, and doctors were no longer struggling for the right words for the system to understand and record. Newer systems even provided each user with an opportunity to teach the computer to understand† the way that he or she speaks (Parente et al. , 2004, Historical Development of Speech-Recognition Technology, para 7). According to Business Source (2006), many hospitals are now using voice recognition technology with ease and finding the system quite dependable. Though expensive, using this â€Å"technology to replace transcription can lead to savings of over $10,000 a year. Thus, adopting voice recognition solutions can eliminate the need for in-house transcription staff, resulting in huge cost reduction† (para 3). The voice recognition technology has many functional uses; they â€Å"include transcription, patient monitoring, interactive response systems, telemedicine as well as electronic health record generation, maintenance and security† (Business Source, 2006 para 2). Though one must always be sure that patient privacy is protected, Wager, Lee, Glaser (2005) describes voice recognition, as a â€Å"method used in health care† which can best be used in â€Å"work environments where using a keyboard, mouse, or touch screen is not practical. † The newer systems are capable of understanding the speech of the user and how he or she applies the voice, through tone, pitch, and pattern; then this â€Å"is converted to computer-readable data† (Wager, et al. , 2005, p. 220). The voice recognition does not come totally without disadvantages. The disadvantage of these systems is the time it takes to train the computer to recognize the speech. This is a particular challenge in an area with many users. Higher-end systems are designed to understand any person’s speech, but most of these systems have fairly limited built-in vocabularies. Most would agree that speech recognition is still under development and its use is most likely in certain segments of health care, such as radiology, pathology, and emergency medicine. However, it does have the potential to be used with many other types of health care applications (Wager, et al. , 2005, p. 220). The use of voice recognition systems also requires the user to be aware of his or her surroundings. One must take precautions to restrict use to areas which are not accessible to the public, as the voice may carry and patient information may be heard by wandering ears. Depending on the information this could be harmful to the patient (information used may lead to identity theft if overheard) and violate confidentiality laws.