Errors introduced through transcription are a problem seldom talked about, said Stratton of Pennsylvania Hospital, but it is potentially huge. So there's a lot of faith that that report is the correct one for that patient. With speech recognition, that issue has gone away. The current generation of SR systems substantially advances the technology introduced in the mid-1990s, when only 10 or 15 sites were using speech recognition. Discrete systems required measured speech with pauses between words for best recognition accuracy.
Continuous systems are capable of recognizing natural speech.
That wasn't going to fly in our department. But advances in computing power have enabled support of a more complex language model, which not only recognizes natural speech but is also capable of anticipating context. By storing your habits, it gets better and better at learning what you are saying. So the more you use the system, the better it gets. Accuracy rates and the time it takes radiologists to correct SR's mistakes remain the biggest stumbling blocks.