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A customer of mine has a product based on DragonNaturallySpeaking that medical doctors use for dictation. They are doing a brisk business. It's all software. No fancy hardware. For this use case, it's almost flawless. And way faster than typing. The only commands you give are related to the recording -- stop/start/playback-type commands. Not sure how sophisticated it gets beyond that. But the speech-to-text technology is pretty damn good now.


At this point in the SOTA, Whisper [0], can probably be a drop in replacement for the for-profit Nuance versions of Dragon, etc. It's even open source.

[0] https://github.com/openai/whisper


The part about it being all software surprised me. All the Dragon workstations I've seen have these remote controls attached:

https://www.speechrecsolutions.com/mic_guide_handheld.html

Turns out they're third party devices. That makes Dragon more impressive than I thought.


Medical dictation probably follows a pretty standardized pattern? Easier for the software to work well when it knows what to expect.


my dentist inputs my tooth readings via voice while she's operating on me. seems to work well for them




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