Voice Recognition - I hate it

My company is making the move to VR for as many accounts as they can and, wouldn't you know it, the account I love and am doing really well on and making good money on is going to VR.  My line rate is slashed in half and I have spoken to other people who have gone to VR a few months ago and they say they are not making anywhere near what they were making typing.  This really annoys me as I NEED the money!  I may have to look for another job.  Anybody know of any good companies that you can actually just still TRANSCRIBE for like the good old days?  I hate this VR!

• Voice Recognition - I hate it - EmmaMT
  • The companies are making a huge - Anon For Now
    • Wrong! - sm
      • That is an outright untruth! We are paid 3 cents less than our normal quote, at least I am. - VR MTSO
  • The company I work for only pays - 4 CPL for VR, no bonuses, incentives
    • would that company start with a "T" and - EmmaMT
    • 4 cpl - texan
      • I say you need to do away with everything in your sentence after - sm
      • 3.5 cpl at Sten Tel - for VR.
        • same as one that i worked for; 3.5 also - aa
  • at least you didn't lose your job offshore - nm
    • You can get a government grant to pay for - No, better to lose to offshore
    • VR is a much bigger threat to MTs than offshore - will ever be
    • With a pay cut like that...they might as well offshore. - no can do
  • VR - JunJul
    • Have to agree with you on that! Love ES. Makes lots of $$$$$. nm - VReDitor
  • I agree - the company I work for is doing the same - and after I did the training,
    • vr - texan

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Take my advice and avoid voice recognition if you can.  Half the pay for the same job!

Hi: 

I noticed your comment about Transcend and the Voice Recognition program.  Well I worked there about 4 or 5 months and never could get the hang of it.  I do not mean to be discouraging, but I really did not like their program.  If your line count does not improve, I would look somewhere else.  I know they have wonderful company and some of the greatest people ever, but they are not paying your bills either.  Look out for yourself in the long-run.    Hope this helps. 

Just curious how the transition over to speech was going for other MDI employees. 

nm

From my own experience, you can make more typing.  The pay for editing is usually pretty low, by the line, and because the recognition is so bad, you might as well type the reports. The companies that market SR basically tell their prospective clients what they want to hear, e.g. that their SR can understand bad dictators and ESLs, that their SR isn't thrown off by background noise and that the doctors can dictate from anywhere (like their car in heavey traffic), and the SR will understand them.  I myself use SR to transcribe due to bad hands and wrists and I know what it can and cannot do.  I spent a lot of time training mine so I get around 98% accuracy.  Very few doctors will put in that kind of time.  The worst SR program that I have edited is Dictaphone and it is just terrible.  E-Scription is better and more user friendly.  Medquist's program isn't bad either, but it still boils down to how good the dictator is and if he/she is willing to change his/her dictation habits and where they dictate from, and most importantly, use a headset when they dictate.  Once a mumbler always a mumbler and if they are used to dictating their reports right after they see a patient, in the hall with phones ringing, nurses talking, etc., it is a lost cause as far as SR is concerned.  You might want to search the archives for messages from other people who have tried editing SR.  Good luck.

I haven't been able to get any clear answers.....have been told some unsettling news about low pay per line for VR work.

Anyone who does VR work.....what is your pay per 65-character line?  No company names needed!!!

If so, what is the average line rate? 

Thanks so much for the info.  My only other question about Transtech is this:  My accounts would be 50% straight transcription and 50% VR so I'm wondering if I would make the money I need to make.  I have never done VR before and they are aware of that, but obviously they have a lot of accounts that do VR.  I've seen others post here about that.  Do you do both and if so do you make decent money?  I have to have a certain income level so being new to VR I have no idea what to expect.

I am currently looking to change companies, and from the posts I have seen, VR does not seem to be too popular, with a huge cut in cpl, so I want to put those companies at the bottom of my list. 

Could everyone please list their COMPANY NAME and if they are

  Currently using VR

 Planning to switch to VR soon

Any comments about cpl, how long it took to get back up to previous pay, and if you like VR would also be greatly appreciated. 

Thanks for your time.  

I can't stand VR and am looking for a new job where it is just straight typing like it should be - anybody work for companies who are not jumping on this wagon?

Besides DSG and possibly Precyse?

Thanks in advance!

I despise VR. 

It amazes me that I'm seeing so much negativity on the board here regarding the new speech recognition programs out there  and the companies using them - and yet I see posts that in the companies using these systems most of the accounts have not been switched to these formats for editing. It appears to me that many of you are fearing the changes and fussing without actually working with the systems to see what it can (and can't) do for you and your productivity.

I've been in this industry since the 70s and remember when carbon paper was replaced with copiers.  Yup, some MTs (back then called "typists") thought they'd be replaced by a copier because they would no longer be typing say a Social Security  Disability Physical 3 times to give all of the copies necessary .... and yet they weren't replaced.

Next computers came out.  "The sky is falling and we'll be replaced by machines" was feared by many.... yet the field is still growing in jobs available.

Some of you old timers may remember programs like Foxx and other word processing programs out there way before WordPerfect was even dreamed of... and when you began typing with those programs you feared your job would be replaced.  Nope, still working all of these years later.

Then came along WordPerfect, followed by Word and now other programs that are better and help you be more productive - without taking away your job.

Face the facts, folks.   Technology is changing and with the government mandate that all medical records be on an electronic format within a few years hospitals have to try to find ways to cut costs to be able to afford this.... and speech recognition is the way to get this achieved.   Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance reimbursements continue to decrease to hospitals so they have to cut costs where-ever they can.   In the 1990s when I worked for a cardiovascular surgery group they would be reimbursed approximately $7000 for a triple bypass, and now they're lucky to get $1800... and yet the cost of running a surgical practice has gone up.   

There are now even robots to assist surgeons instead of nurses but yet a surgical RN is still in the operating room, because there are times the robot isn't going to be able to do what is needed for the surgeon.  Are surgical nurses screaming that the sky is falling and they'll be replaced?  I'm sure that some are - but others are realizing that they still have plenty of job opportunities still in the operating room because the computer will be helping them, not replacing them. 

The goal of speech recognition programs is to help you do your job quicker and more effectively, not replace you.  Think about that dictator from heck who talks 100 words per nannosecond while eating - the one you think nasty thoughts about the second you see his/her name pop up onto the screen.  I've seen some of these same speech recognition systems produce a darned good draft - and I was able to edit this report much faster than I could have even typed the motor mouth one time, much less go back through 3 times to fill in my own blanks, because the system helped me out on deciphering the jibbery-goo. 

The bottom line is this:  You shouldn't knock such systems until you try them.   I've got MT friends who thought they would hate editing and actually love it once they got used to it. 

With these systems infiltrating the market you can try to run and hide from them, but eventually they'll find you (just like the copiers, computers and various software programs have).   Another positive is that by companies using these programs that ARE helping keep your job here in the US.   The foreign-based MTs have a much harder time editing reports because they're not familiar enough with the language to easily spot the errors the system makes that the veteran MT would spot quickly.

We'd all love to go back to the days of getting paid 15 cpl for a gross line of work but if you ask around, in the industry the average company now collects 12-14 cpl, 65 character line, for transcription and much less than that for edited reports.  Therefore the high salaries are gone and it's all due to competition.  Back when the going rates charged to hospitals was 22-25 cpl for a gross line the higher line rates were abound, but that has all changed not only in this industry but others.  For example, look at the airlines - used to be that if you flew from New York to San Francisco Angeles it would cost you around $700 and now you can book it for around $260.  That's what competition has done to that industry.  I'm sure that none of you will call Delta and insist that you pay $700 for that flight just to help save the jobs of their employees who are looking at the strong possibility of that airline bankrupting on them. 

Therefore I encourage everyone to try new things before you knock them - you just might even like the new things on the market even better, and you'll find your hands and wrists suffer less wear and tear. 

I was looking at a Request for Proposal from a government medical facility and was struck by a clause that said in bold - No voice recognition software will be acceptable

I thought it strange that they put this in the request. They obviously don't have any faith in it and will not allow the contractor who wins the bid to utilize it. I guess that's good news for we who are worried about it.

causing low work situations at times.  They push those jobs through VR and Exspeech rapidly and I found Exspeech to be one of the worst editing platforms I had ever used.

Hopefully, TT will pick up accounts in order to keep all those 25+ MT's they are advertising for busy -- because the jobs on these new accounts go through VR at a rapid rate, and regular transcribing disappears in a hurry.  If these 25+ MT's don't like Exspeech method of editing, then you will most likely end up with lack of work very soon.  It happened with the *big hiring spree* back in October last year !  The mass hiring of MT's are used to *train* dictators for Exspeech.   The pay reduction is at the rate of 50% less for editing.

I suppose most companies in this business are going in that direction now to make larger profits. 

t.y.