Revisiting Technology: Speech Recognition

In this episode of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell revisit speech recognition technology, look at the ways people are dictating text today, and discuss arguments for and against using it in your law practice. Mighell discusses how faster speeds and improvement in broadband for Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and other tools have made speech recognition a hot topic. He personally uses dictation most often when sending texts from his smartwatch, but he runs into connectivity issues. Kennedy has recently tried dictation again, yielding relatively successful results, but he would not use it to draft full documents. He discusses lawyers’ interest in full-time dictation, using an application like Dragon Dictation, and how younger lawyers come into the workplace with the ability to type faster and more efficiently than any speech recognition program. Both Kennedy and Mighell agree that the success of speech recognition technology depends mostly on social and cultural acceptability.