I am a huge fan of Nuance's Dragon Dictation, the free iPhone app that lets you speak a few sentences to your iPhone and have them quickly transcribed for an e-mail, text, etc. The app works great, and when it makes mistakes they are very easy to correct. The Nuance technology is also used in Siri, another useful app that I recently reviewed. Dragon products have been available for the computer for a long time now and even come in special editions for lawyers and doctors. I've been wondering whether Nuance would use its special knowledge of legal and medical terms to improve the iPhone app. We now know that the answer to half of that question is yes.
This week, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is holding its annual conference and exhibition in Atlanta. One of the exhibitors is Nuance, and yesterday Nuance announced a new line of Dragon Dictation iPhone products for people in the medical field, all of which are discussed here on the Nuance website.
First, Dragon Medical Mobile Search is an app that will let you use your voice to search for medical information on sites such as MedScape, MedLine, Epocrates and Google. That app should be available by April 30th. Second, Dragon Medical Mobile Dictation is a version of the iPhone Dragon Dictation app that understands medical terms. Thus, doctors can use it to dictate their medical notes. Third, Dragon Medical Mobile Recorder will record longer dictation, send it to the Nuance website, and have the transcription sent back to the doctor as a "high quality draft document" for the clinician to "review and sign-off." That last service requires a subscription to Nuance's transcription services.
Additionally, Nuance announced a Dragon Medial Mobile SDK that third parties can use to add Dragon Medical Dictation technology directly into their medical iPhone apps.
Nuance has not yet announced a price for its medical apps.
Why am I writing about this? I don't think that I have a huge audience of doctors who read iPhone J.D., except perhaps for my brother (hi, Kevin!) but if you look at the Nuance press release and replace the word "medical" with the word "legal," you can easily imagine some great new Dragon Dictation apps for lawyers. We know that Nuance has a lot of experience understanding words spoken by lawyers and translating those words into written legalese, so it seems like a natural product for Nuance to develop. I see that Nuance will have a booth at the ABA TECHSHOW in just a few weeks, so you know what my first question will be when I visit with the folks from Nuance.
As much as I love Dragon Dictation on the iPhone, I should note that I am not a fan of the same product on my computer. I have tested the Dragon Naturally Speaking several times over the years, and I find it cumbersome to have to wear a special headset to dictate my briefs. I also get frustrated by the accuracy because even though it is almost 100%, those few errors always seem to take me a long time to fix, plus fixing them disrupts my writing process. As someone who can type fairly quickly and has always avoided dictation in favor of just typing everything myself, using Dragon on a computer just slows me down. On the iPhone, however, I can speak and fix any mistakes faster than I can type on the virtual keyboard, and I say that as someone who actually does pretty well typing on the iPhone keyboard. Having the ability to dictate sentences that include legal terms, legal cites, etc. on my iPhone when I am away from a computer would be very useful.
I have no inside knowledge about whether Nuance is developing anything for lawyers who use iPhones, but with yesterday's announcement of the Dragon Medical Mobile suite of apps, I am now crossing my fingers that this is something that we see soon. In the meantime, lawyers who work on medical malpractice cases, medical paralegals, and other lawyers who frequently deal with medical terms might find something useful these latest announcements from Nuance.
