Voice writer

Voice writing is a method used for court reporting, and it is also used by some medical transcriptionists. Using the voice writing method, a court reporter speaks directly into a stenomask or speech silencer—a hand-held mask containing one or two microphones and voice-dampening materials. As the reporter repeats the testimony into the recorder, the mask prevents the reporter from being heard during testimony. Voice writers record everything that is said by judges, witnesses, attorneys, and other parties to a proceeding, including gestures and emotional reactions, and either provide real-time feed or prepare transcripts afterwards.

In medical transcription, some transcriptionists use voice writing, versus typing, when working out of their own home. They receive audio files and use a voice recognition program to translate voice to text. No mask is needed, but a good headset with appropriate microphone is necessary. Sometimes an updated sound card needs to be added in order to have excellent clarity for the voice recognition software. This can be done easily with a small sound card which is attached to the microphone cord and then inserts into a USB port. A foot pedal is also used.

A voice writing system consists of a stenomask, an external sound digitizer, a laptop, speech recognition software, and CAT software. A foot pedal can plug into a computer's USB port.

A real-time voice writer's words go through the mask's cable to an external USB digital signal processor, From there the words go into the computer's speech recognition engine, for conversion into streaming text. The reporter can send the streamed text to a) the Internet; b) a computer file; c) a television station for subtitling; d) to an end-user who is reading the captions via their laptop, tablet, smart phone, or e) software which formats the results in a way most familiar to judges, attorneys, or subtitling consumers.

Voice writers enjoy very high accuracy rates, based upon pure physiology. The route taken by a person's words goes from the mouth to the reporter's ear, brain, and "inner" voice. This form of repetition is naturally effortless; it is what we all do in our daily conversation, as we listen to a person speak, or when we read a book. So the most natural extension of this process is to psychologically switch the repetition mechanism from "inner voice" to the physiological "spoken voice." Therefore, we minimize the introduction of cognitive overhead in our task of routing the spoken word to its permanent destination as printed words. This streamlined process allows voice writers to achieve excellent performance for many continuous hours and greater than 98 percent accuracy at speeds as high as 350 words per minute.

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