Who can use Live?
Live can be utilised by anyone working within a primary care environment:
- General Practitioners
- Locums
- Care Coordinators
- Therapists
- Nurses
- Medical Secretaries
- Paramedics
- Pharmacists
- Dentists
- Opticians
- Administrative staff
What can Live be used for?
Our speech engine is optimised for UK medical speech, ensuring 99% accuracy for a range of applications:
- EMIS and TPP clinical systems – clinical notes, patient records, reports
- Microsoft Office – referral letters, insurance claims, documentation, presentations
- Emails
- Internal messaging
Why use Live?
Speech recognition is up to 4 times faster than typing manually. With increased demand on primary care, using Live will speed up your day-to-day tasks, allowing the reallocation of time for other responsibilities.
Live allows users to record and capture far more important data, allowing increased content capacity. With patient records now being visible to patients, this is increasingly important to protect patients, practices, and the NHS.
Where and when can you use Live?
Live allows flexibility within your working environment and technology setup. The Live desktop application can be used anytime and anywhere with a suitable microphone or recording device. The mobile app can be used to dictate anywhere that has WiFi (or
4G/5G) access.
With the ability to log in on multiple devices, Live can be used on different PCs within the practice, on various mobile devices and when working remotely.
Below are some basic tips to consider when dictating to ensure you get the best recognition results.
- When testing the service, use realistic UK medical speech. There’s no need to use phrases like “testing, testing” or “1, 2, 3”.
- Speak at your normal pace.
- Speak in full sentences or paragraphs, as you would do during normal dictation.
- Include punctuation in your dictation (i.e., full stop, comma, new line).
- If using the mobile app, you can hold your phone in front of you or put it down on a table. Either way we recommend being within 1m of your phone for best recognition. The volume indicator will show if speech is being picked up.
- When pausing for a long time (e.g., over 10 seconds) press the ‘stop’ button in the recording app, then the ‘record’ button to resume, as you would do if using a traditional recorder.
- Minimise background noise
- Speak clearly and face the microphone or mobile device. You should be able to speak quickly and still have good recognition if you speak clearly.
- You may find it easier to look away from the screen as your dictation is being displayed in real time – it can be distracting. You will be able to go back and amend any area of the text after you’ve finished dictating.
- If you do choose to look at the screen, you may find that the desktop does not display the text immediately but has a delay of a second or two. You do not need to wait for the text to display on the desktop to keep dictating.
- Your application icon will be red when not recording:
- Your application icon will be green when recording:
By default, the service runs using ‘Type to cursor’ mode where text is streamed directly to your desktop cursor.
Alternatively you may prefer to use the ‘Type to window’ mode where text is instead streamed to a Dictate.IT Live text floating window:
You may want to use this mode when you want to dictate a document but refer to multiple other pages / applications e.g. different pages in an EPR. You can continue dictating into the floating box while you navigate the EPR, then when you are finished you can insert the contents of the floating box into the destination e.g. the notes field of the EPR.
Enabling the mode
Mouse-over the recording button and click the ‘Settings’ icon.
The settings panel then opens:
Change the ‘Text mode’ from ‘Type to cursor’ to ‘Type to window’:
Then click ‘Save changes’ and close the settings panel using the ‘X’ in top right.The Floating text box window should now appear:
Dictating
When you dictate, text is streamed into the text box. While recording the box’s background is grey and the text cannot be edited.
When you have finished dictating stop recording, and the box will turn white. The text can then be edited if desired or inserted into the desired location. Alternatively, you can start recording again to continue your dictation.
To insert the text, place your text cursor into the text box where you would like the text to go, then press ‘Insert’ in the floating text box window. Text will then be moved over to the destination and removed from the Dictate.IT box. You can then dictate another note.
To switch back to the ‘Type to cursor’ mode, change the option in the settings menu:
