There’s some truth to David Wheeler’s recent statement that, “Voice recognition will always be stupid.” For a “stupid” technology though, it continues to make headlines with the likes of Facebook’s recent purchase of a player in the space, Mobile Technologies. Nonetheless, voice recognition technology, while clearly advancing over the last decade, still has its limitations and imperfections today. The real value of voice recognition is not in its standalone capabilities but what this type of technology is capable of when layered with language understanding and artificial intelligence. What’s clearly not “stupid,” is the idea that fusing these three technologies will create an intelligent system – or, put simply, a system that is conversational and able to understand our actual intent.
Voice recognition technology - despite some limitations and imperfections - can save time, money, and lives when layered with language understanding and artificial intelligence
By Bud Lawrence, MD, emergency medicine physician, Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital and Nick van Terheyden, MD, CMIO, Nuance
There’s some truth to David Wheeler’s recent statement that, “Voice recognition will always be stupid.” For a “stupid” technology though, it continues to make headlines with the likes of Facebook’s recent purchase of a player in the space, Mobile Technologies. Nonetheless, voice recognition technology, while clearly advancing over the last decade, still has its limitations and imperfections today. The real value of voice recognition is not in its standalone capabilities but what this type of technology is capable of when layered with language understanding and artificial intelligence. What’s clearly not “stupid,” is the idea that fusing these three technologies will create an intelligent system – or, put simply, a system that is conversational and able to understand our actual intent.
But that forward thinking and yet not-too-distant vision for voice recognition is neither here nor there. To derive the real value of voice recognition today, we need to take a step back from our own lives and look at how this type of technology is impacting more than just customer service or easy, on-the-go restaurant recommendations. Today, hundreds of thousands of clinicians are using voice recognition to streamline the giant hurdle from paper patient records to electronic health records. Clearly, this isn’t an application of voice recognition that’s mainstream in the mind of the consumer. Still, it’s one that should be. Let’s face it, we all have or will be a “patient” at some point in our lives. Your doctors’ ability to capture and share your complete, digital patient story will, eventually, come back to help or (hopefully not) haunt you.
A recent article by The New York Times’ David Pogue provides an interesting jumping off point for considering how smartvoice recognition technology can be in a healthcare setting. Pogue states: “It’s much faster to say, ‘Open Angry Birds’ than to flip through home screens full of icons. And ‘Set my alarm for 8 a.m.’ is about 375 finger-taps quicker than using the clock app.” This same sentiment holds true for doctors, except replace “Open Angry Birds” with “Show me the patients’ vitals and medications.” You can also replace “Set my alarm for 8 a.m.” with “Schedule follow-up appointment in two weeks to discuss biopsy results and related treatment plan.” As in our own lives, we don’t want our doctors wasting time manually paging through the electronic health record. We want them focused on us, the patient, not technology. Therein lays the beauty and power of voice recognition.
Voice recognition allows us as doctors to clearly and thoroughly convey our thoughts and the subtleties of the medical decision making at hand so as to ensure that patient information, in its entirety, is then available for any care hand-offs that will undoubtedly take place. Doctors not using voice recognition with the electronic health record are often less apt to capture the nuances of the patient record because of the amount of time it takes to type vs. speak. Moreover, navigation of an electronic health record is no easy feat so being able to use your voice to access specific parts of the patient record vs. manually paging through drop down menus is highly valuable for an on-the-go doctor.
The perfect storm facing healthcare today is putting even more pressure on doctors to find ways to ensure the quality of care they provide but to also find a way to see more patients in order to remain financially viable and, well, open to see patients in the first place. Yet another benefit of voice recognition is that it truly cuts down on productivity loss. Doctors spend up to 30 percent of their time documenting care in an electronic health record. Voice recognition can help doctors reduce this time spent documenting by 20-30 minutes per day. That’s valuable time that can be devoted to patients, and also to that doctor’s own family.
In closing, we’re not trying to make the argument that voice recognition is where everyone would like it to be today – it’s an evolving technology, as all great technologies should be. What we are trying to convey is that, depending upon context, say if you’re a doctor, the ability of voice recognition to act as an intelligent, conversational interface between doctor and machine – when lives are on the line – is nothing short of remarkable.
