Text-to-Talk Goes to the Cloud with Phillips SpeechScribe Transcription Service
April 03, 2014
By Karen Veazey, TMCnet Contributing Writer
I can spend all day (OK, maybe just hours but still way too much time) snickering over DamnYouAutocorrect.com. Miscommunicated messages among friends are ridiculously funny, as long as you’re not barreling down the freeway trying to talk-to-text an important message. Trying to tell your boss you’ll “be there shortly” and instead hitting send on “I’ll be your shorty” just isn’t how you want to start your day. And of course you’re not reading texts while driving to spell-check them, right?
Talk to text functions would be massive time-savers for many of us. It’s part of the reason dictation was popular in the Mad Men era, when people could talk faster than they could peck away at a typewriter. Even now most people still talk up to seven times faster than we type, meaning our thoughts can be long gone by the time we get them into a text or email. Yet the promise hangs out there; we muddle along with our phones and Google (News - Alert) Talk because we think the perfect speech system has to be just around the corner.
So what is the problem with speech recognition systems that leave us laughing at texts and shouting at automatic attendants? Speech experts cite the speed and flexibility of the human mind as they key. While our brains are able to quickly adjust to cadence, speech, accents, pitch, volume and all the intricacies of human speech, computers are just desperately searching their database for the closest match.
The solution for automated talk-to-text may still be out there but Phillips’ SpeechScribe is actually rolling back the clock on technology for the sake of accuracy. Users dictate their copy into an app, dictation microphone, or pocket voice recorder and send the file to the secure SpeechLive cloud. Professional transcriptionists produce the written document and send it back to the user. Files can be prioritized and turned around quickly based on requirements. Currently the system can be used in both English and German and packages are available for company level pricing. Solutions are available for law enforcement, real estate, legal, healthcare and other high-usage industries.
The basic SpeechLive small business package allows up to ten users for $9.99 per user per month, with a three month subscription. The advanced package allows twenty-five users for $12.99 per user per month. A variety of recorders and microphones are available through Phillips.
So while you’re still going to need to pull over to text your date and tell them you’re on the way, that late night inspiration for your novel can now be dictated anytime and you can wake up to fresh copy waiting.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson