Talking up software LOVELLS: speech recognition and digital dictation studyTop ten City firm Lovells has unveiled a major pilot study combining speech recognition and digital dictation technology with a view to rolling it out across the practice.The firm has been testing the new equipment on 30 of its solicitors and their secretaries.

The product is supplied by BigHand TotalSpeech, whose integration software incorporates Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Phillips digital dictation technology.

With digital dictation, users speak directly into their computers, which then save the speech as sound files that can be converted to text by secretaries later on.

The firm said this would help fee-earners working out of the office who need to send dictation back for typing up.

It also hopes to use the 24-hour secretarial services of its larger offices to help the smaller ones.

Recognising in part that some solicitors still prefer to have secretaries, Lovells expects to concentrate use of speech recognition on instances where the fee-earner is currently typing such as e-mails, file notes and simple unformatted drafting or while travelling and other times when secretarial support is not immediately available.

If the project proves successful and cost-effective, the firm intends to roll it out across 2,500 people in 26 offices world-wide.Lovells chief operating officer Nick Cray said the technology was cheap enough for its use to be spread throughout the firm, costing just a couple of hundred pounds for each user.

It is already making lawyers more effective and efficient.

He explained: If solicitors are going to be hanging around at seven oclock at night, they wont want to be taking tapes over to the word processing pool and hanging about waiting for them to be typed out.

This allows them to make better use of their time.

But Mr Cray insisted that computers will not be replacing the firms secretaries.

It will just make their jobs more interesting because they wont be sitting at a keyboard all day, he said.Paula Rohan