Understanding Dictation and Dictation Software from a Business Perspective, Part II: How It Can Help You and Your Business
In response to my last article on this site, I received a very interesting set of questions, those questions inspired me to write another one.
The overall question seemed to be, “How can dictation help me and my business?”
Dictation can help you in a myriad of ways. Right now, we're just going to focus on a few of them.
It can save you an incredible amount of time. As I mentioned in my last article about the subject, I often complete assignments now in 3% of the time that it used to take me to complete them.
There is a lot more to it than saving time, however. Because this software is literally transcribing every word that I speak into to the program, it often feels like I have an audience for my writing--in that the software itself is literally responding to me in real time. This made me feel a lot more relaxed and genuine in any type of correspondence. If you feel that too much of your time is taken up with talking on the phone and you need to write a blast email to every one of your colleagues, dictating that blast email can be a good compromise in that regard: you are still writing the email, but since you are speaking it out loud, it feels like you're still talking to them. This requires a leap of faith and imagination, but engaging in imaginative play inside a workplace environment makes necessary tasks go down a lot easier.
Dictation can also help you feel more confident as a writer and communicator. One of the most fun experiences of dictation is being able to see your own words in real time as you speak them out. As you are doing that, who can deny the confidence boost that you get--the same sort of confidence boost you would get if you were a musician, and you were in the audience of a concert where someone else was on stage covering your own song. That brief injection of confidence that comes every time these blocks of words appear on the screen in front of me does something wonderful: it diminishes my inner critic. It certainly doesn't give you the confidence to write a Pulitzer prize-winning novel--yet--but because you are speaking and typing at the same time, there is no need to pivot between the two tasks--and to wonder how you are going to type out what you just heard in your head.
Lastly, making dictation software available to your employees is a wonderfully positive step on the road of diversity, inclusion, creativity and equity. These concepts need to be seen in order to be believed in, and believed in in order to be acted upon. Witnessing a person who needs dictation software (for any reason at all, regardless of if it's physical, mental or spiritual) flourish once they realize what they can do with it will create a happier, more involved employee and a mor