TECHNOLOGY IS GREAT WHEN IT WORKS

It was always great to get a new toy on Christmas morning or for my birthday. Of course, depending on the present, the newness often wore off after a day or two, and the thrill was gone. There were of course those exceptional presents (i.e. a bicycle) that continued to bring pleasure, or at least provide usefulness, long after my birthday. I find the same thing with technology, such as the Blackberry cellphone I acquired last year, and now can hardly do without.

Along that same line, I recently became aware that the Windows Vista operating system comes prepackaged with a speech recognition module. For those of you who are not aware of it, I was the primary initiator of the use of voice recognition in our radiology practice, in which we annually dictate several hundred thousand radiology reports yearly using voice recognition, with the radiologist dictating and immediately signing the reports for electronic distribution within minutes of when the examination was accomplished.

Anyone with a minimum amount of technical expertise and a maximum amount of patience can ultimately a use voice recognition to speed and enhance the process of placing spoken thoughts into a print document. At the beginning, this is very inefficient, but once it becomes second nature, then it removes the barrier of the pen or keyboard, and thoughts can flow freely onto the page, virtually without conscious effort.

Of course there are several downsides to this. First, you tend to prattle on when there's really nothing worth actually saying. Second, when you get really good at it, you begin to assume that it is perfect and you don't proofread your documents, and send them wherever they are going even though they are actually not nearly so perfect as you thought.

Having used consumer voice recognition products as well as (very expensive) professional voice recognition products, the recognition system embedded in Windows Vista (and available for download for XP and other versions) is just about as good as anything I've ever used. You will need to spend $60.00 or more for a good microphone with active noise cancellation, but that's about it. The tutorial built into the package was quite good, but there will still be a lot of frustration before the novice feels comfortable with the technology and the result. You'll soon find it easier to say Hashimoto's thyroiditis rather than type it. I will say it again, Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Good luck to you; I'm off to write the great American novel!