Most financial advisors I know have typing skills that qualify them for minimum wage at best. Yet with past, current and undoubtedly future regulations, quality documentation becomes even more vital.
Even though I am a fast typist, 60 words a minute just doesn’t do it. Years ago, I first bought into Dragon 2.0. The promise of being able to dictate as fast as I could talk (about 160 words a minute) hooked me. I bought every upgrade since. But it was not until Dragon 8 that I began recommending it to Bill Good Marketing clients.
Dragon has done it again! They have a reputation with me and countless thousands of others that their upgrades are, in fact, real upgrades. The new Dragon is faster, even more accurate, and worth every penny of the $99 to upgrade. If you are already a Dragon user, do the upgrade. If you are not, you should order the premium edition.
The premium edition has one feature that you will need. There are others, but I consider this one vital. It’s “text to speech.”
The very best way to proofread a document is to have two people involved. One person reads the document aloud, and the other person follows along in the text.
The second best way is to have Dragon read it to you. Few things are more embarrassing than those slippery errors that a spell check won’t pick up. When the Dragon synthetic voice reads it, you will hear it, see it, and then correct it.
One very important feature of Dragon is the dictation box.
Undoubtedly you will want to dictate into your CRM. The problem is that this text field has not been optimized for voice recognition. In previous editions of Dragon, this meant you could not use your edit commands.
Dragon now pops up a dictation box. When you’re done with your dictation, you just say “Click Transfer” and the text is immediately transferred to the other program.
If you buy Dragon, or want to upgrade your skills, I recommend the “Ask the Dictator” videos on YouTube. You can find those here.
By the way, Dragon is one of two speech recognition tools that I use. The other is Copytalk. I mostly use Copytalk for my meeting notes. I use Dragon when I want to make the corrections.
When I dictate meeting notes, and often times emails, a copy of the transcript goes to my assistant. She proofs it, sends it on to the Computer Operator, or sends it to whomever I dictated the e-mail to. While I get a copy of it, after I’m done dictating, I’m essentially done with it.
But when I have a longer piece that requires some degree of thinking, I will use Dragon. I will often dictate a paragraph, sometimes when I look at it, I think, “whoops,” and then I say “select paragraph,” and then “cut that.” And then I dictate again.
