What are some speech recognition products available?

ViaVoice is voice recognition software made by IBM. This software allows the user to create a customizable vocabulary of over 300,000 words, compose documents and e-mail, navigate through the Internet by simply stating web addresses and use customized voice command shortcuts. ViaVoice works well with a variety of other PC applications and a medical vocabulary expansion is available. ViaVoice is a satisfactory and reasonably priced alternative to more expensive medical voice recognition software.

Paul Spilseth, MD, Stillwater, MN says:

"I have used ViaVoice to document the visit of every patient I have seen for the past three years. I tried the standard edition first, but the medical vocabulary is well worth it. It takes some dedication to get it up and running successfully."

Visit ViaVoice's web site to find additional information about this product.

Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) is a type of voice recognition software made by Nuance. Its ability to translate speech into text with a high level of accuracy has won DNS acclaim from many physicians who use the professional medical edition of this software. Dragon Naturally Speaking works with many EHR applications, contains a large medical vocabulary and allows users to navigate through various software applications using voice commands.

Louis Spikol, MD, Whitehall, PA says:

"Within Dragon there are two aspects: speech to text capability - the obvious use that most of us who use speech recognition rely upon and command and control - the ability to activate program commands and operating system commands. Dragon is fairly good at both and, in fact, it is possible to operate the complete computer by voice."

Visit Nuance's web site to find additional information about this product.

MacSpeech is the only developer of voice recognition software for Macintosh. It's newest software, iListen, has the ability to dictate, format, and edit directly in virtually any application. Although there is not a specific medical edition of this software, iListen can launch over 150 applications and has an extensive vocabulary: 30,000 native vocabulary words and close to 300,000 background words. It is relatively inexpensive and easy to train and use.

Visit MacSpeech's web site for additional information on this product.