Voice technology - are you speaking to me or my PC?

For many smaller law firms - particularly very small firms and sole practitioners - the Holy Grail of office automation has been the search for a system that will allow solicitors to generate correspondence and documents without the expense of having to employ a full-time secretary.

For this reason, the emergence of speech recognition technology (SRT) about ten years ago was initially welcomed by these firms as the potential answer to all their prayers.

But, as many firms soon found out, these early SRT systems were horrendously expensive - not least because they also required high specification PC hardware to support the software application.

Furthermore, they also involved a long and drawn-out learning curve before users could achieve anything like acceptable speech-to-text transcription speeds - and large amounts of spare time to spend on training a system to recognise their voice accurately was one thing most of these early users did not have.

The net result was that although some practitioners did break through the training barrier and not only become proficient speech recognition users but also far less reliant on secretarial support, the majority lost interest.

Since then, SRT has benefited from substantial improvements in terms of performance, with learning times dramatically slashed.

And the price has also plummeted - you can now buy entry level SRT software from as little as 50, while almost all new PCs come ready loaded with enough multimedia processing power to support such an application.

Unfortunately, the market has moved on and now a new form of voice technology - the digital dictation system (DDS) - has become one of the fastest-selling items of law office automation in the UK today.

DDS began as little more than an alternative to the traditional analogue tape dictation and manual transcription systems that lawyers have been using since the 1960s.

However, the combination of digital dictation with workflow management techniques and the ability to move digital files across computer networks, including the Internet, has led many firms to conclude that this is one technology that can deliver real productivity gains almost immediately.

And it does not require the wholesale retraining of fee-earners or changes to their traditional ways of working.

Charles Christian is an independent adviser to the Law Society's Software Solutions guide.