The topic is somewhat like man versus machine, but not exactly so. When the computer came into being years ago, people the world over thought that they would be out of their jobs. Soon, they realized that the machine was useless if it was not handled and used by humans.

I know some would still argue that the human dependence on machines have made people less smart and lethargic. I would argue against this. I think human beings are smart to make use of machines. Anyways, what I wanted to discuss today is the so-called threat of the voice-recognition software for medical transcriptionists.

It was believed that instead of recording dictations into any audio instrument, doctors could use the voice-recognition software to record dictations which in turn will transcribe the audio into text, creating medical records. Thus, the world would need no medical transcriptionist. Now, let me explain the flaw in this logic.

The software needs to recognize voice in order to transcribe. That requires time and effort from the doctors. And you know time was one of the factors medical transcription came into being. Doctors are busy. They cannot be expected to spend time to ‘train’ the software. Now, even if they made that initial effort, the software requires them to speak clearly, preferably in a noise-free environment in order to recognize each and every word. Thus, doctors need to spend time and effort each time they use the software. This beats the whole purpose of saving their precious time.

Even if the software took less time and effort, it wouldn’t survive. This is because the results delivered by the software are far from being accurate. And the reason for this is that it cannot ‘think’ the way humans do. Now, creating accurate and complete records required human intervention. And this meant the medical transcriptionist was the one editing the document created by the software.

You can understand that the purpose of the software failed, and people realized that it was far from being a threat to the medical transcriptionist. The transcriptionist, in fact, started using the software as an aid to his/her work.