Law enforcement

Evolution of writing instruments: From Biro pen to speech recognition

Just like when the Biro pen was introduced decades ago, modern day writing instruments continue to be developed to help document our thoughts, and our work, with permanence – and accuracy.

Seventy-five years ago, this past weekend, Hungarian brothers László and György Bíró filed a patent for their revolutionary invention – the ballpoint pen. Its creation eradicated the need to rely on fountain pens and the medieval quill, which were more prone to produce smudgy and messy script. Closing in on a century later, people continue to trade in older, manual instruments for sharper tools; solutions like voice-enabled technology, that, like the ballpoint pen, can capture more detailed documentation.

While we don’t anticipate pen – or paper – to disappear anytime soon, for businesses who heavily rely on documentation, especially ones facing increased regulations and governance, smudgy or messy documents just won’t do.

Financial advisors are just one example. Because financial compliance is contingent on capturing clear and detailed notes during the advisor-client interaction, many advisors and financial services firms are shifting away from manual note-taking processes and turning to technology solutions, like speech recognition, to help.

Law enforcement, too, cannot trade accuracy for urgency. While police officers need to create incident reports in a speedy manner to meet prosecution deadlines and move criminal proceedings along, they also need to ensure what is documented in their reports is highly accurate; if not, this can literally impact a case.

So with nearly 40% of police officers saying they spend 3-4 hours each day on incident reports, it’s not surprising that they, too, are looking for sharper tools to help with their documentation needs.

Everyone benefits from accurate documentation– transcription costs are lowered for those paying the bills, and workflows are automated for individuals across locations and devices; saving time, mitigating risk, and producing precise results the first time, every time, by the user.

Voice and language solutions are just one of today’s tools that enable professionals to produce intelligible, unambiguous, and thorough reports, notes, forms and other business paperwork, immediately and accurately. Not only are they intuitive to use, these technologies empower workforces to improve productivity and streamline workflows with the ability to add custom options, like templated content by voice or industry-specific terms and acronyms.

Enough ballpoint pens have been sold to draw a line to the moon and back hundreds of thousands of times; however, with no disrespect to the Bíró brothers, if you’re going to document something permanently – and when accuracy matters, sometimes you just might need a sharper instrument.

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