Does speech recognition play a part in digital transformation?

Used correctly, speech recognition can dramatically improve productivity

When it comes to digital transformation, most professionals will point to the cloud as a key business enabler. They might also mention DevOps, SaaS and automation. What they probably won't talk about is speech recognition.

Nuance is the developer of the Dragon Communication software. At Computing's latest IT Leaders Summit, Liz Halifax-Smith of Nuance said that, while speech recognition - itself a form of automation - might not push a company towards digital alone, freeing employees from being shackled to their keyboards can do so.

Speech recognition has something of a poor reputation in business. Even 10 years ago, such software needed hours of training to produce a workable document. Misunderstandings were common ("Recognise speech" could become "Wreck a nice beach"), and microphones had a habit of picking up sounds that weren't directed at them - even when their owner was innocently practicing the tuba.

Today, speech recognition is everywhere: in our phones, our computers and, of course, smart speakers like Amazon's Alexa. The quality is much higher, thanks to deep learning - a subset of machine learning that is, itself, a subset of AI.

Nuance's Dragon learns in a similar way. Instead of reading paragraphs of text to train the programme, as was the case with early versions, users now only read a single sentence so that the software can ‘hear' how noisy the environment is; and it learns how users talk over time.

Halifax-Smith drew parallels between speech recognition and automation, both of which maximise productivity by lowering the amount of time that employees need to spend at their keyboards. More advanced speech recognition software uses automation to clean up speech, apply formatting (automatically applying a UK date format, for example) and use macros.

According to Computing research, going digital has actually increased the amount of paperwork that employees need to complete, especially in regulated industries like legal and financial. 52 per cent of business professionals now spend more than seven hours a week on reporting, and eight per cent spend more than 15 hours. Employees could focus on a range of other activities if the business could cut this dependency, such as creating happier customers (49 per cent) and developing a healthier bottom line (47 per cent). 66 per cent thought that such a move would also lower stress.

"If a highly-paid finance professional can save an hour or two per week, this can translate into thousands of pounds on time savings alone," said Halifax-Smith.

"Now add in the opportunity costs of how that time might be better used on tasks that deliver more value back to the business, and it's easy to see how helping just one individual to be more efficient can make a significant difference to a company's bottom line.

"Multiply that by all your team members who are spending more time than they need typing, and this soon adds up to a competitive edge."