Healthcare driving speech recognition technology growth

No big surprise here - healthcare is deriving huge benefits from speech recognition and a new report from DataMonitor just reaffirms this. You can see the press release here

Healthcare currently represents 85% of the market for PC- and server-based speech recognition technologies.

Good news for the providers of speech recognition and speech understanding:

Datamonitor estimates in its report, Automating and Enhancing Processes through Voice in Desktop and Back Office Environments, that the global market for speech recognition in healthcare is currently worth an estimated $170 million. It projects that between 2008 and 2013 the market will more than double in size.

Which seems very conservative when you consider the current size of transcription market estimated anywhere from 6 - 12 Billion dollars. And that industry and content is currently pouring documents into the Electronic Medicals Records (EMR) filling some 60% or more of the content in these systems today. The problem with documents is they are only really human readable (it is possible to apply some level of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to them but that process remains difficult and is not happening with any significant amount of market penetration today). What these systems need and are crying out for is data that is machine readable and therein lies the real opportunity for speech and in particular speech understanding to deliver clinical data directly into the EMR from the dictation process....