Will voice recognition affect medical transcription?

From time to time, medical transcriptionists are suspicious about voice recognition software over taking their jobs. Even today we get tons of questions about this and so we thought it is better to address this issue.

What the heck is voice recognition?

For those of you who are not familiar with voice recognition technologies, let us give a brief introduction. In today’s medical transcription world, there are two kinds of transcribers – One who transcribes video to text and predominantly called as medical transcriber or medical transcriptionist. The other is the guy who edits it. It is the responsibility of the editor to quality check and make sure that it is good to be delivered to clients. Now there was a period when software burst happened and software came in the market stating that they will be able to provide good transcription. However most of them gave 40 to 60% accuracy. None of the software was able to produce 100% accurate result which may be impossible with the current technology framework.

Voice Recognition is there for a while:

You may wonder, but voice recognition technologies are there for a while right from 2006. Multiple companies have tried to provide the best transcription that can be used for medical transcription. But till today there is no one stops solution for this. There is no software that can provide 100% accuracy results when compared to human transcribers.

Will MT business slow down because of software domination?

Since its inception, there were multiple questions. Right now situations for MT are so clear and people are still outsourcing to humans to interpret their audio. But in future there may be slight slip in terms of relying humans for transcription. However the editing part of the transcription business will be always there as software reaching 100% accuracy is very much unlikely to happen.

Few disadvantages of voice recognition:

1. Well, it is not accurate. A well spoken audio file (which is difficult by itself), can be translated in the accuracy range of 40% to 60%.
2. This low quality transcription has to be proof read and changes have to be made.
3. Voice recognition does not recognize all slang of a doctor.
4. Voice recognition needs crystal clear audio.

With all this challenges we are sure that Medical transcription is still a blooming industry with tons of job offers with high quality pay. We still see people taken up MT course which is really a great sign for this industry.