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Voice-Activated Technology for Lawyers
By Jim Calloway, Director, OBA Management Assistance Program

This month we cover what some might think to be an unusual topic - the role of your voice combining with technology in the 21st century law office.

Lately we’ve seen more voice-activated technology enter mainstream usage. I decided to cover this topic for two reasons: first was an experience I had with my home Internet service provider and second, because of a free voice-activated technology service that I’ve been using and enjoying lately called Jott. I think many of you may want to try Jott.

I had a positive experience using voice-activated technology with my cable and Internet provider. I lost Internet service, but not cable or phone. So a call in to the company was warranted. After navigating a few menus, a voice pleasantly informed me that all tech support people were busy and the wait would be a while. It asked if I would like to try to fix the problem with their voice command system. “Yes,” I replied, and spent a few minutes responding yes and no to the computer’s queries. At one point the computer advised me that it could not “see” my modem on the network and asked me to reset it. Soon the system was fixed.

I did note that the consumer experience was a bit more positive giving verbal replies than punching buttons for menu choices. I’m not sure I see law offices having such complex choices that they could ever justify putting in voice-driven menus for callers to the office. But you never know what options future technology will bring.

And so, let me move on to Jott, an interesting bit of voice-activated technology that has recently been getting a fair amount of notice and many positive reviews.

This service is free, at least for the present time in its “public beta” edition.

You can set up the Jott service by going to jott.com. For fast and easy set up, you want to make sure that you have access to both your e-mail and your mobile phone when setting it up, as both will require verification.

Simply put, Jott is a service that will let you dictate messages of up to 30 seconds of speech, which it then transcribes via speech recognition software and sends out as e-mails. (There are other ways to use the service such as sending text messages, but let’s stick with e-mails for simplicity’s sake.)

As we know, speech recognition software is not perfect, so when Jott generates an e-mail, it also includes a link that will play the original voice dictation in case there is an error.

Most of us are using Jott to make brief memos or to-do lists for ourselves. After all, it seems like your mobile phone is always with you and by combining caller ID with speech recognition software, doing a reminder to yourself is almost effortless.

One lawyer excitedly called me about his use of Jott to dictate brief memos or letters to clients after hearings either in the courthouse hallway or on the way home. (The non-driving method is obviously safer.) By dictating these brief letters at the courthouse and using Jott to e-mail them to his assistant, the letters can be prepared and ready for his signature when he returns from court.

I find that dictating appointment and calendar entries through Jott is actually quicker than entering them via my Treo’s keypad. Then when I get back to the office and open the e-mail, I can copy and paste the appropriate calendar entries into Outlook and avoid ever typing them at all.

When you think about it, there are a number of possibilities for this service. Do you have trouble keeping track of all your credit card charges and ATM withdrawals? Why not set up a dedicated e-mail account and tell Jott that e-mail is called The Bank? Then every time you make a charge on a credit card or make a withdrawal from an ATM, you can dictate the details into Jott. When it comes time to balance your checkbook, you just log in to the e-mail account to verify all of the entries and then delete the e-mails.

I do note that this service really only seems fantastic if you use voice command dialing with your mobile phone or can set up a speed dial entry on your mobile phone for Jott. Anyway, give Jott a try. But don’t blame me if you get hooked and it then becomes a pay service.

Dictation has long been a staple of information delivery within the law office. This is one area where the technology has completely shifted. While there’s nothing wrong with buying another $50 handheld cassette unit, firms that utilize the dictation/transcription production model need to go ahead and make the leap to digital dictation systems sooner rather than later. It is certainly an investment, but there will be a resulting productivity increase in most offices.

In the April 2007 Oklahoma Bar Journal, I wrote about the virtual replacement of cassette dictation equipment with digital dictation equipment that is occurring in law offices across the country. See “The Rise and Fall of the Dictation Tape,” Oklahoma Bar Journal April 14, 2007 (Vol. 78 1021).

If you didn’t catch this article when it was originally published, I strongly suggest that you take the time to read it if your office is using cassette-based dictation.

Then there’s also the argument abandoning the dictation/transcription production model entirely in favor of the “dictate and correct” model. Speech recognition software is one of the technologies that failed to deliver on its promise for years and years.

But, as I noted in the summer of 2006, this product is finally ready for prime time. Large parts of this article were voice dictated and although the result was not perfect, dictating a rough draft and then manually doing corrections is now a fairly fast method of production. In some part, this depends on your typing speed. If you can type 100 words per minute, then speech recognition software is certainly not for you.

The tool I am using is DragonDictate NaturallySpeaking Preferred Edition 9 from nuance.com. Since the software package was released over a year ago, I have a feeling that we will see version 10 of the software released before the end of this year. I have no inside information about this. It is just a hunch.

Here at the Oklahoma Bar Center we upgraded to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones. This is not the same thing as VoIP systems such as Skype that some as using to make free or very inexpensive long distance phone calls.

Here we are talking about a VoIP phone. The prior phone system was old and had been creating some problems. But the primary motivation for the change at this time was the move of half of the OBA staff to the modular offices. With a traditional phone system there would have been an enormous amount of rewiring to move all of the phones to a new building. With this VoIP voice system, one just does all of the network computer wiring and plugs the VoIP phone into the computer network.

In fact, you can carry the phone to a different office, plug the phone into the computer network outlet and the phone will still be “your” phone.

There are numerous benefits to this system. But the one that we noticed immediately is an application that delivers us our voicemail as e-mail attachments. It is quicker to retrieve a voicemail as an e-mail attachment. But even more important is the fact that you can easily save a particular voicemail if you need to because we all understand how to deal with saving e-mail attachments.

Larger law firms will be determining when to deploy this state-of-the-art technology change over the next few years.

The old saying is that “talk is cheap.” As you can see from this brief overview, when you apply technology, sometimes talk is cheap, sometimes it is free and sometimes it is expensive, but well worth the price. Of course we lawyers have never believed that talk is cheap anyway. Sometimes spoken words can be very valuable.

Originally published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal October 6, 2007 - Vol. 78; No.27.