Dictate Your Options – Voice Recognition Australia

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Dictate. Dictation. Transcription. Voice Recognition. Dragons?

It’s all a bit confusing. Let me see if I can quickly explain your options for dictating in 2022.

You have decided to review how you are dictating your reports/letters and the costs associated with this. You have decided that you want to have control over this process and not have to rely on third parties. You have decided to stop wasting money on expensive transcription services. You have decided to look to a technological solution to solve this human problem.

You’ve probably been paying for an expensive manual transcription service. This means you’re paying upwards of $2.50 per minute.

Then you have to wait for the dictation service to complete the work. If you want a quick turnaround then you can pay as much as five times as this. A normal turnaround time is about 72 hours. Then you have to receive the work, check it and make any necessary edits. You could be waiting a further 72 hours for those edits to be done. Of course, you can complete the edits yourself but that kind of defeats the purpose of paying so much money for a dictation service. Let’s look at those options.

You could try a cheap offshore dictation service.

This might get you below two dollars per minute but the accuracy will be a lot lower than an Australian dictation service. Also, you run into legal compliance issues if you work in a legal or medical field - you probably need to check your legislative requirements about sending confidential data overseas.

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 The problem is that you will have to spend a lot more time editing and returning the dictation. Is it really worth your time? Also, the turnaround times are longer with the cheaper services. And you don’t have direct control. You have to wait for them to come back to you. What if your clients need something really urgently and you don’t have staff available?

Another option could be to employ someone to do the typing. 

There are a lot things to consider when employing someone to complete your dictations. Firstly, they have to be a really good typist - otherwise, you are wasting your money. Secondly, anyone who is good at typing is probably employed by somebody else are they going to be expensive to recruit. What you do if you get someone who is a really good typist and they have to leave due to a family situation/health issue or perhaps retiring? Then you’ve got to go through that recruitment process which will be expensive. And then you might not find the right person so you might have to go through that again. Let’s call that at least six months and then you might have someone who can do it so my competently. This recruitment and training process is going to cost at least $20,000 and then you might not get the right person.

Then you need a budget of about $65,000 a year salary plus superannuation and leave. So, let’s call that an even $85,000 for the year for your transcriptionist plus the initial $20,000 outlay for the recruitment and training process. 

So that’s over hundred thousand dollars to employ an in-house transcriptionist.

That’s frighteningly expensive. Then you have to manage this person to make sure they do their job correctly. They also might need to learn medical or legal terminology which will take at least a year or two. What if they leave after they learned these valued specialist transcription skills? I don’t know what you going to do when this person goes on leave or get sick.

What happens if you need something done urgently if they are unavailable and you don’t have an existing relationship with one of these transcription services - because you haven’t needed them? That will take you a few hours to get up and running. Sounds like a busy and expensive day…

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Technology has now arrived which will allow you to take direct control over your dictation.

You can harness your ability to dictate to radically drop your costs for transcription. You can already dictate effectively because you’re doing it right now to your existing staff or outsourced typing service. If you’re going to speak into a microphone why not have the words immediately appear in the document of choice that very second? It just makes sense to dictate and complete the task on the spot. Why wait for someone else to do it and then send it back 72 hours later with errors in it and then pay for the privilege of correcting those errors?

The answer is you don’t. You can take control right now. You can control the costs and the timing. You will not be reliant on cloud-based services that may be unreliable.


We can advise you about the different options available depending on your profession. Also, we can advise on different options in terms of dictating at your computer vs dictating while out and about. We can also tell you exactly what to expect and exactly what it will cost without any ongoing fees.

I’d be very surprised if this did not drop your transcription costs by about 90% in the first year if not 100%.

This a couple of things you need to consider first before you can start saving all this money:

Dictation style. Can you dictate reasonably clearly? Be honest. If you can’t dictate reasonably well then speech recognition probably isn’t for you. You don’t have to have level 9000 Barack Obama dictation capabilities but you do need to be prepared to say “full stop” “comma” and not run all your words together as a continuous stream of thought. The occasional pause, and speaking at a consistent medium rate does wonders for speech recognition.

Training. You may need to learn some other software. For example, in a medical practice you might be using Best Practice, Medical Director or Genie. Law firms use their own management software as well. In the past, you might have had staff directly input into these programs. If you want to use voice recognition it can be helpful to learn to use the software you have already invested in. Voice Recognition dictation software will not teach you how to create a new report within Best Practice. So make sure you are across the basic features of your current practice management software.

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You don’t have to learn these programs, we can show you how to use voice recognition with your existing voice recorder/phone so that you don’t have to interface with other programs at all. It’s just more efficient if you do understand the other programs used in your office.

Technology. You have to invest a bit of your time to get these large cost reductions by using voice recognition. This initial phase will only take a few hours. And then by using voice recognition software daily it will become part of your regular routine. Initially there is a bit of effort that you need to be prepared to put in. The payoff is that you will save tens of thousands of dollars per year if not hundreds of thousands. Voice recognition is not a magic bullet, as it does require a bit of effort initially, but the payoff is enormous.

Eventually using voice recognition should save you about 1-2 hours per day (compared to typing it yourself). And the cost savings are enormous. Especially when you consider the above points already made about recruitment costs and outsourcing

Control. Once you’ve mastered the basics of dictating using voice recognition you have complete control over your dictation requirements. There is no waiting. There is no paying three dollars per minute. There is no editing required of someone else’s work. If you want to dictate at 9 o’clock at night then you can and it will be completed that evening. If you want to dictate after seeing each patient or client then you can do that as well. This will save you having to remember it at the end of the day. The records will be more accurate and richer. In giving the increasing need for government compliance (and insurance requirements) having more comprehensive records can only be a good thing.

What if your third-party transcription service goes down?

During the recent global malware attacks - many different companies had difficulties. Many cloud-based transcription/voice recognition services failed to work leaving many medical and legal companies in the lurch. Our Voice Recognition products are loaded directly onto your Windows computer and can also be used with your voice recorder or phone. 

So that’s the basics.

Voice Recognition has improved at such a rapid rate in the last few years that it is a viable alternative to traditional dictation and transcription services.
Voice Recognition dictation is also far less expensive and has no ongoing costs. You have direct control. You can complete tasks immediately. You are not relying on anyone else such as staff or third-party companies. You don’t have any subscription to pay for.

We will walk you through every step of the way to make sure you’re comfortable with the voice recognition dictation technology and the benefits that it brings.

We have a number of options available including direct dictation at your computer and mobile dictation using your phone or handheld recorder such as an Olympus device. We have medical products and legal products we also have other software solutions for business professionals in other areas such as finance and insurance.

Stop giving your money away and take control of your dictation.
We can have you up and running within a few days.

Get yours today! Trials available.

Streamline your dictation now, get Dragon!

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