21st Century Eloquence - Speech Recognition Specialists. Industry Trends.

21st Century Eloquence – Industry Trends

1999 Update

Eloquently Stated

The business of medicine is about to be streamlined as 21st Century Eloquence unveils its new voice recognition product for the medical community: Eloquently Stated.

Eloquently Stated is the first medical database to be integrated with voice recognition technology. It is a document creation assistant that creates reports and templates with unparalleled speed and efficiency.

In the past few years, voice recognition technology has evolved to the point where it is now efficient, affordable and practical for everyday use in business. However, for medical professionals, adding voice recognition to a medical practice is still only half of the battle.

Eloquently Stated is the missing link for medical professionals, allowing the use of voice recognition to manage patient records and medical histories, and to create comprehensive referral source databases.

Eloquently Stated is the only medical database designed for physicians by a physician with 5 years experience in the voice recognition industry. This new program is specifically designed to accommodate a contemporary doctor’s needs, minimizing the interruption in a physician's standard work flow.

With voice recognition software and Eloquently Stated – the missing link – customizing and organizing your medical information has never been easier.

What distinguishes Eloquently Stated from other products is its unique use of insertable library modules. If you purchase one of the Eloquently Stated Insertable Library modules, such as The Eloquent Orthopedist, there will be additional features available to you in the Dictation interface. The orthopedic library module includes over 1500 Insertables; professionally designed information packets intended for use with Eloquently Stated. These allow physicians to fill out their documents accurately and professionally, citing references when needed.

The extraordinary power and practicality of the insertable library modules cannot be adequately described. Due to their highly technical nature, the tremendous advantage of these modules is best experienced firsthand. But it should suffice to say that these modules enhance the practicality and efficiency of the program to an extent that cannot be approached by other medical transcription solutions.

"This product will revolutionize the way doctors conduct their business and organize their time. In the long run, Eloquently Stated will save doctors a lot of money," said Dr. Eric Fishman, M.D., president of 21st Century Eloquence and a practicing Orthopedic Surgeon.

Eloquently Stated currently works with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Lernout & Hauspie VoiceXpress voice recognition software. In order to automate certain tasks involving the creation and editing of documents, Eloquently Stated works very closely with Microsoft Word 97 word processing software.

More information about Eloquently Stated can be found at http://www.eloquentlystated.com or by calling 21st Century Eloquence toll-free at 1-800-245-2133.

L&H

The Lernout & Hauspie's L&H Voice Xpress Professional™ won two PC Computing Awards at Comdex; 1998 Most Valuable Product and Breakthrough Award. Its version L&H VoiceXpress for Medicine version 2.02 is available in several specialties including: General Medicine, Primary Care, Radiology, Pathology, Emergency Medicine, Mental Health, Neonatology/Pediatrics, Cardiology and Orthopaedics Editions.

L&H also has released a new product called Now You're Talking Deluxe. It introduces Natural Language Understanding Technology™ which lets you control the entire MS Office 97/95† suite with everyday-style conversational speech instead of computer language. Other features include; Text-to-Speech, Voice WebFinder™, Voice AddressBook™, Voice Calculator™, Voice Scheduler™ and Voice Clock™.

Dragon Systems

The Dragon NaturallySpeaking family of products has its version 3.5 released. The primary changes in this version are: Select and Say™ editing has been added to third party applications including: Microsoft Outlook, GoldMine®, Microsoft Chat 2.1, Notepad and WordPad; added desktop control that allows users more command and control capabilities in Microsoft Office; the ability to open applications from the start menu and switch between applications; true number formatting - say 69 dollars and 56 cents and you will get $69.56. In addition, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is SAPI IV compliant.

Speech Recognition Leap?

Hardware has been probably one of the biggest barriers in speech recognition. Intel has announced release on first quarter of 1999, a new generation of processors; the Katmai, which is a follow-on to Intel's MMX Technology. Among the most important new instructions in Katmai is a new memory-streaming architecture. Katmai New Instructions will enhance the performance of speech recognition applications, which continue to grow in use and popularity. Katmai New Instructions will speedup the front-end audio processing, and depending on the exact code used by the speech software developers, will increase the throughput of the search algorithms involved in pattern matching. For continuous speech recognition, the end result will be a reduced error rate and/or a shortened response time. This will be an exciting, enhanced capability as speech recognition is integrated in a growing number of business and consumer applications.

What about Apple?

The major speech companies -- which include IBM (NYSE:IBM), Dragon and Lernout & Hauspie -- are locked in a heated battle to dominate the PC space. But since Dragon abandoned the market, none have expressed serious interest in the Mac.

Apple itself may enter the speech recognition market. While it already has PlainTalk, which allows voice navigation through menus, the company has promised dynamic new features when it releases OS X later this year, and rumors swirl that stronger voice recognition will be one of them. Apple Computer Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL) has sold 800,000 iMacs

Macspeech, a four-person company that includes former developers of PowerSecretary, intends to produce a speech recognition program for the Mac platform. The company is looking to license an engine from a major player and gain funding from venture capitalists.

Whoever gets there first, wins it!