Digital Dictation or not?

Benefits outweigh the costs
Essentially the benefits significantly outweigh the costs. Basically it depends upon what you want from your dictation system and what I mean by this is do you want to send letters to your secretary to transcribe, do you want to link your dictation system to a voice recognition package such as dragon naturally speak which will automatically transcribe, this works better with standard letters as the system recognises your voice better or will you email dictations to an outsourced typing pool, many of these have sprung up around the country to service large London legal firms or even send to India for transcription.

As regards cost it depends greatly on which system you would choose and whether you would use a server-based product or a locally-based product. Judging from your post a system such as Philips Speechexec Pro would suit you which is loaded locally onto the PC not the server, this would cost about £300 for an author and £200 for a transcriptionist and that is you on digital dictation, no ongoing costs such as tapes or a license fee. Installation is simple if you have someone even half savvy with computers. Don’t just look at Philips though consider Olympus, Grundig and Sanyo. Steer clear of Big Hand and Winscribe unless you are prepared to pay big bucks for an install and I believe both these products have an ongoing license fee.

Its all a matter of size
I work for one of the UKs leading digital dictation software developers nFlow and we have supplied our solution to a wide array of professional service firms with the smallest being just 5 users and the largest being over 1100 users, including firms like PKF and Scott Moncrief.

Bob Harwick makes a good point about it being dependent on the size of an organisation as to which digital dictation solution is the right one. Philips SpeechExec Pro or Olympus DirectRec standalone solutions are both good if you do not intend to grow over about 5 users however you suggested you are a growing practice. In our experience larger firms find that the overhead of managing standalone systems becomes significant. Workflow solutions take care of everything whereas standalone solutions typically need more administration especially if you have a growing number of users.

As to cost I partly agree with Bob. He is right that you can buy these products for £200 - £300 but a server based workflow solution is not that much more expensive on a like for like basis. I can't speak for the products quoted by Bob but we are a direct competitor of those systems.

Bob does make the point about installation costs but products like SpeechExec and DirectRec can either be easy to install yourself or horribly difficult and then you will need to configure them to work for you. If you equate this to billable time then installation of a server based system will not be expensive.

As for an annual licence I am not sure about this. Typically annual costs are for software support and upgrade assurance. Upgrades are usually free for standalone systems but this is not always guaranteed. When you pay for software upgrade assurance you fix how much you pay for any upgrades. As for support, when there is a problem you don't know how solve do you want to be able to call someone and get help or is this not going to be a problem for you. This is available with standalone systems but typically it’s the same cost as with server based systems.

Bob gives good advice that as you are a standalone system would be fine however maybe the question is if your practice is growing do you want to invest in a system that you may quickly outgrow. Taking aside the fact that I have already declared myself as an interested party I would still suggest if you envisage your practice growing look at both standalone and server based before you decide.

Hope this helps.

Try Voice Recognition again.
hi Andrew if you failed dismally with voice recognition software a few years ago you really should try it again. I am dictating this using Dragon naturally speaking preferred version 8 and it really is quite good "out of the box".

I can't be doing with these silly headset microphones so I have a small Sony microphone with a baffle to reduce noise and that worked really well.

The software has definitely improved over the years but I'm sure one of the main points is the dramatic increase in computer processing speed that we have achieved.

I have not corrected punctuation above and I did want to say 'work' instead of 'worked' in the second paragraph above but other than that it seems to have a lot of potential.

Strangely, the software seems to work better, the faster you speak.

I have tried using the Dragon software with a Phillips Voicetracer machine. That works well if you dictating out of the office but frankly, if you're in front of your computer I think it's easier just to dictate straight into the program with a microphone.

Food for thought I hope and the cost is not a lot!

Yes I use a dictaphone
Sorry I should have said I use a dictaphone.

I am just thinking about things like voice recongition etc., tried it many years ago and failed miserably.

Thanks for your answers so far!

This may help...
Essentially the benefits significantly outweigh the costs. Basically it depends upon what you want from your dictation system and what I mean by this is do you want to send letters to your secretary to transcribe do you want to link your dictation system to a voice recognition package such as dragon naturally speak which will automatically transcribe, this works better with standard lettersas the system recognises your voice better or will you email dictations to an outsourced typing pool, many of these have sprung up around the country to service large london legal firms
or even send to India for transcription

As regards cost it depends greatly on which system you would choose and whether you would use a server based product or a locally based product. Judging from your post a system such as Philips Speechexec Pro would suit you which is loaded locally onto the PC not the server this would cost about £300 for an author and £200 for a transcriptionist and that is you on digital dictation, no ongoing costs such as tapes or a license fee. Installation is simple if you have someone even half savvy with computers. Dont just look at Philips though consider Olympus, Grundig and Sanyo. Steer clear of Big Hand and Winscribe unless you are prepared to pay big bucks for an install and I believe both these products have an ongoing license fee