Bighand go on tour as speech recognition wins recognition

Voice technology specialist Bighand is about to embark on 12 date tour of North America plus a four-city user conference. The tour kicks off at the NYC offices of Fulbright & Jaworski on 1st June and ends at the offices of Foley & Lardner in LA on 23rd June. In between it will visit Washington DC, Boston, Charlotte NC, Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto and San Francisco. The tour will feature a keynote by Ari Kaplan on the topic of Recovery, Renewal & Reinvention: navigating in the next decade looking at the challenges law firms face in the years to come.In addition, Bighand is holding its first ever series of regional user conferences in Charlotte (7 June), Philadelphia (8 June), Chicago (14 June) and Toronto (21 June). For further details about all these events contact Allison Stegich at [email protected]• In a related development… Vancouver-based law firm Guild Yule LLP recently reported significant timesavings in document production turnaround time and reduced costs, by implementing BigHand’s server based Speech Recognition Module last year, where the flexibility of the speech recognition workflowprocess has allowed the firm to automate re-distribution of the document production workload during busy times, while allowing lawyers to dictate anytime and anywhere on their smartphones.Adam Howden-Duke, a partner at Guild Yule, said “We wanted to introduce greater efficiencies in the way lawyers managed their time and how we were utilizing our support staff. When the idea was initially floated, there was some skepticism as to whether the use of speech recognition software would be successful. However, once implemented, we were surprised by the accuracy of transcription, and ease of use. The user interfaces for both dictation and document production are easy to use and with the right training, the recognition rates are often around the 90th percentile – even for a foreign trained lawyer like me.”Part of the advantage the firm saw with speech recognition software was the reduction of document turnaround time for assistants, freeing them up work on other business critical matters. Howden-Duke added “The most notable change is the assistant time saved on the task of transcribing. According to my samplings, BigHand has reduced the time an assistant spends on creating a document from dictation by 50%, and in some cases up to around 75%.”