Workflow smartened up by speech recognition

Law firm Hermans-Wirix from Tongeren is adding speech recognition to their daily workflow.

Hermans-Wirix Advocaten is a young and dynamic law firm with all staff in their thirties and forties. The firm consists of four lawyers and two administrative assistants who defend the interests of their clients in the field of commercial and corporate law. The firm is dedicated to entrepreneurs and has only business clients. Lawyer Christophe Hermans and his colleague Pieter Wirix are also both receivers at the Commercial Court of Tongeren. 

Mr Wirix has been dictating for about ten years. He first started with analog dictation using cassette tapes, then switched to digital dictation and recently also started to use speech recognition. Lawyer Wirix: “The analog dictation went well in itself, but the cassette tapes wear quickly and were also quite expensive and sometimes the quality was not really perfect, which is why we switched to digital dictation at my previous office.” 

Lots of advantages

He thinks one of the main advantages of digital dictation is the sound quality. The words are clear and comprehensible, and this is a great advantage for our administrative staff. Another advantage for our staff is that a certain feature can be applied to the voice files. “We can enter a keyword to indicate whether it is an e-mail, a letter or an internal memo, which makes employees immediately aware of which software to open”, explains Mr Wirix. Nico Moris, administrative assistant to Mr Wirix adds: “A dictation file can also be assigned to a specific person, so we can make a distinction between tasks to be typed by me or by my colleague.”