Active Forum Topics | Getting Started | Interviews | EMR Forum | Medical | Billings | Press & News | Voice Recognition | The Water Cooler
Would you settle for the #1 and #2 ratings by PC Magazine? Last month’s issue of PC Magazine (which is larger than PC World) rated M-Tech as having the two fastest laptop computers among other niceties.As far as your challenges are concerned, our Nuance-certified BBB accredited company’s reputation speaks for itself but everyone is free to draw their own conclusions. I'll be the first to admit that I probably paid too much for my equipment but I look at it this way. A professional mechanic wouldn't be caught dead purchasing his tools at Wal-Mart and since I make my living with my tools, I always buy the best. My desktop computer was definitely too expensive but I don't begrudge the price of my 3.2 GHz i7 quad core desktop computer with 2 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 video cards powering 4 30 inch monitors or my ridiculously overpriced $2400 stone mountain covered memory foam office chair because these are work tools and anything that can save me time or make me more comfortable in the workplace is going to make me more efficient which directly translates into profit. This is probably the same reason why your stethoscope has the letter “L” rather than the letter “K” (as in Kmart).It seems like you're always recommending eBay which sells more pirated software than legitimate (and costs everyone in the end) and you're always recommending using DNS Preferred which isn't remotely designed for medical use. Granted, I don't have to pay for my DNS software but I'm using DNS Medical rather than Professional or Preferred because it has more capabilities and if we were on equal footing, I would be working circles around you because I'm using software that's designed specifically for the workplace as opposed to consumer grade software. DNS Preferred uses the same speech engine as DNS Medical but it's nowhere near as accurate or featured and if you used it as it was intended, for 30 days, I think you would clearly see the difference. Note that Nuance includes a customer satisfaction 30 day no restock fee guarantee. To give you some idea how this works. If you attempt to dictate a forum posting, such as this, or an e-mail with one of the DNS Medical vocabularies, your accuracy will drop significantly. In fact, DNS Preferred would most likely do a better job on an e-mail. That's why Dragon Medical includes 48 vocabularies with one of them being for standard dictation. Medical dictation is highly specialized and when you attempt to use the general large vocabulary, which is included in DNS Preferred, for medical dictation, you're not going to experience the best results. Based on the average experiences of our clients, you'll have 3 times more errors to correct with DNS Preferred than you will with DNS Medical. The best way to test the DNS Medical against DNS Preferred is to create 2 new user profiles and perform out-of-the-box testing. You can certainly improve your accuracy and narrow the gap between DNS Preferred and Medical by struggling with Preferred over a good deal of time but you'll never be able to fully equal the accuracy of DNS Medical which brings up the question: What is your time worth?My company sells more copies of DNS Pro and DNS Medical than any other vendor and I work virtually unassisted Monday through Friday. My partner works on the weekends to prep boxes and print manuals. Somehow, I manage to keep on top of things while handling our new Live Online Support, charging credit cards, shipping domestic & international orders, answering e-mails, handling sales and support calls and still have enough time to post on this EMR forum. At this very moment, I'm testing a new VXI parrot Bluetooth microphone. I can do all this because I'm using Dragon Medical and taking extreme advantage of its macro capabilities. I even use NaturallySpeaking to answer telephone questions because I don't know the phone number to Smoltz Distributing where my customer needs service for their digital recorder or where someone can download a WordPerfect service release patch but I can quickly obtain an answer to those repetitive questions because I've programmed them into NaturallySpeaking. I even use NaturallySpeaking to dial phone numbers. What can your speech recognition software do for you?I realize that you will infer, from this posting, that I'm just trying to sell overpriced software but what I sell and support are solutions. When you recommend Kmart tools to professionals you typically wind up burning yourself and your customers. Is Dragon Medical overpriced; absolutely. Is it worth it? Yes because any product or tool that can make a significant impact on your workflow will pay for itself. Of course this is just my opinion and I'm not attempting to change yours. The entire purpose for our M-Tech posting was to make the public think and nothing more. In other words I felt this information was important enough that I should spread the word. I'm hoping that you can accept this on its face value. We don't do everything for profit. If we were a pure profit company, we would never have created KnowBrainer 2008 because it is sold at a loss.
Lunis Orcutt - Nuance Dragon Medical Gold Certified BBB Accredited Speech Recognition/Microphone Solutions Provider
Lunis:
Can you post a URL on the PC Magazine review?
What I did learn is that "PC Magazine" is no more. They stopped writing their magazine in 2009 due to slumping advertisements. This was news to me- I like that magazine. I saw that one coming- their reviews have very little relevance in today's world of ever improving computer systems. Today's fast computer can be purchased 6 months later for 10% of the current price.
That said, for physicians offices, the ebay $300 dual core laptop is more than good enough. A physician has to be crazy to buy a laptop based on the most current review in PC Magazine. M-Tech laptops run between $2500 and $6500... great for gaming but lousy for routine office use.
Al
Al Borges, M.D.
Our apologies for not being able to locate the PC Magazine article but you can check out the 2 following links:Digitizor article on "world's best laptops"M-Tech Customer Comments
If you listen to the podcast here- Link: http://www.hcplive.com/hcplive/great_debate you will hear that Dr. Kvedar has what seems to be a boombox compared to my microphone which although great for DNS, sucks in a debate situation. How do you think he did that? If it's the microphone, which one would you think could achieve that boom sound?
It is really hard to judge from that recording what anyone is using. For example, the moderator obviously wasn't using a pop screen, which he needed badly, and he apparently had his microphone directly in front of his mouth. The beginning of the recording was also over modulated.By comparison, your microphone sounded like it had serious noise cancellation or compression which can artificially color sound by removing the high midrange sizzle. Although this makes your speech less palatable to the human ear it can be more attractive for speech recognition. If we had to guess, it sounded like you were using a Senneheiser ME3 or more likely, a Noise Buster which uses electronic circuitry to create noise cancellation. We suspect that Dr. Kvedar was a couple of feet away from a consumer grade Logitech video conference microphone. This would give him a slight echo but at the same time, would eliminate lip smacks and reproduce more of a full midrange. His microphone probably wouldn't work well for speech recognition but none of these microphones are ideally suited for webinar type recordings. Also note that if you place your microphone in an empty room, bathroom or garage that you will add echo.
I'm going to buy and test the Blue Snowflake USB Mic, as reviewed here- http://the-gadgeteer.com/2008/10/29/bluemic_snowflake_usb_microphone_review/ and won the 2nd spot in the omnidirectional microphone reviews here- http://alatest.com/reviews/microphone-reviews/c3-140 I'll go into it more later when I'm able to test it.
I have to admit- it's cute:
Ebay price: I put in a bid for $40.
alborg: I'm going to buy and test the Blue Snowflake USB Mic, as reviewed here- http://the-gadgeteer.com/2008/10/29/bluemic_snowflake_usb_microphone_review/ and won the 2nd spot in the omnidirectional microphone reviews here- http://alatest.com/reviews/microphone-reviews/c3-140 I'll go into it more later when I'm able to test it. I have to admit- it's cute:
We concur with Martin and would be surprised if the snowflake even passes the Audio Setup Wizard.
I don't plan on using the Snoflake for speech recognition, but for interviews. Hopefully, in my next interview I'll sound somewhat more LOUD and "echoy!" He who yells the loudest wins the debate, but in the reviews that I've come across, I did pretty well, sound issues and all. The bottom line, that Dr. Kvedar had to defend the now unpopular President Obama, made sound issues a moot point. Forcing 100% of physicians into compliance with the unproven certified EHR concept lest they get pushed out of the local market really, really sucks bigtime and I for one hope that it's not the future of medicine.
The absolute best microphone for use on the Internet, to make your voice sound warm and rounded, is the classic kidney bean shaped microphone such as Larry King uses. There are lots of variations and many of them are rather expensive but that would be our best recommendation to give your voice the best on air broadcast sound possible. We were radio broadcasters in a former life but we believe that emicrophones even carries one particular model that you can use. We don't offer these types of microphones because we only deal with speech recognition mics.