[X4U] Transcription, document management (B)

[Stroller]

On 28 Sep 2006, at 02:58, Jim Robertson wrote:
> ...I suppose we could create a server on our LAN to do this, but
> we'd likely need to add another POTS phone line so that more than  
> one of us
> could dictate at the same time. "Express Dictate" can handle LAN  
> traffic
> from multiple computers if we have VOIP, but we're not interested  
> in signing
> up for new telephone service at the moment.

I doubt if you'll do this so cheaply that ignoring VoIP is cost- 
effective. If you have a PABX then you can have a single POTS line  
connected to several VoIP phones in your office - all these phones  
could be in use for dictation simultaneously. Using Asterisk is what  
springs to mind here - it'll run on Linux & a £300 Dell and you could  
configure it so that anyone in the office just picks up their phone,  
dials extension 111 and starts dictating.

I do feel that you're right to be thinking in terms of telephones  
here - they're a very good (or at least familiar) interface for this  
sort of thing. One could suggest recording with your iMac's iSight  
microphone, opening a new message in Mail.app and dragging & dropping  
the audio file into the email, but I just don't think most people  
would feel so comfortable sitting talking at their computer. Manually  
sending transcripts by email is probably not secure enough, BTW - to  
start with it would be too easy to accidentally auto-complete the  
wrong name and end up sending your confidential customer data to this  
mailing list.

Allowing your transcriber to VPN into the office is easy, so she  
could securely connect to a server hosted in your offices by email or  
whatever interface you prefer. You could have each message tagged  
with a unique ID, so that when the transcriber hits "reply" and  
attaches the typed document it is automatically associated with the  
original recording. You mention automated faxing - that's cheap &  
easy. Something like this might cost as much as five grand, but I'll  
bet that for that money you could get a solution that is absolutely  
perfectly tailored to you and beats any off-the-shelf commercial  
offering out there. If you and the other users are stake-holders in  
the company then this is really quite a reasonable expense - getting  
home 1/2 an hour most evenings could easily be considered quite a pay  
rise.

> One problem with the simplest implementation of "Express Dictate"  
> is that if
> we dictate into our computers or into digital recorders, the sound  
> files get
> divided into chunks that can be sent to the transcriptionist as email
> attachments. I'd prefer to avoid that hassle.

Which hassle? That the sound files are broken into chunks? I would  
have expected an option to disable this.

> How difficult would it be
> (assuming we could create the Windows server to handle the analog/ 
> digital
> conversion) to use that computer as an ftp server from which our
> transcriptionist could download the sound files to her own computer  
> at her
> home?

As I say, I'd host it on a Linux server, not a Windows server, but  
it's trivially easy to allow your transcriber to access files on your  
network. FTP is generally considered insecure, but on your Mac you  
can access files by SFTP (secure ftp) if you turn on "Remote Login"  
in System Preferences > Sharing. This is an encrypted connection and  
the transcriber could use a GUI utility like Fugu to connect over the  
internet (no VPN required).

> Anyone have recommendations for other Mac-friendly transcription  
> software?

I would join the Asterisk-users mailing list and post a request there  
for recommendations of consultants in your area. Talk to several of  
them. As long as you're not trying to do this for a couple of hundred  
dollars then this is all easy stuff to set-up.

Stroller.