Speech recognition has been on the brink of major success for decades, so it feels. Rather than set of generic “when will it be mainstream” questions, I was keen to catch up with Martin Held, Senior Product Manager, Healthcare at Nuance, to find out how things stood in this, specific and highly relevant context. How do you see the potential for speech recognition in the healthcare sector? Right now, the most gain will be from general documentation, enabling people to dictate instead of type, to get text out faster. In some areas of healthcare, things are pretty structured – you have to fill forms electronically, with drop-down lists and so on. That’s not a primary application for speech, but anything that requires free text, there’s no comparison or alternative. Areas where handwritten notes are put into notes fields, that’s a good application. Discharge notes can be also be very wordy. From a use case perspective, we’ve done analysis on how much time teams are spending on docume...