Speech editing

The voice recognition software advertisement: "You talk, it types. 99 % accurate." has been proven widely exaggerated. What is now being sold to the hospitals is, indeed, back-end speech recognition. It does not change anything for the doctors. However, it changes your task from straight typing to editing. This means that you have to develop yet another set of skills, one that speeds up the editing process. Even more so, as you may be paid less per line.

The glossaries you have built for your doctors contain their ways of doing the narrative. It is important to have their language right at your fingertips to either speedily correct mistakes or figure out what might have been said before voice recognition failed to recognize what was spoken. Having all the variety of a doctor's phrases available thanks to your glossaries will definitely be of great value.

The new set of skills you need to develop is repertorizing (not symptoms but) the mistakes that systematically occur in back-end speech recognition drafts and find ways to correct these mistakes. That is where Instant Text commands can help with short forms that are easy to remember and easy to type. Moreover, you can use the display form to show in the advisory what the command or chain of commands is supposed to do.

The best is to start a command glossary with entries that handle all these repetitive editing actions such as
- add comma + and
- add comma + but
- add hyphen to end of word
- add period and capitalize next word
- delete last word
- ...

This command glossary can then be included to all your customized glossaries.

In 2004 Susie G. already wrote about this topic. Since then, you may have noticed, an extensive Command menu has been added in version 7 of Instant Text.