In recent years, speech recognition technology has been hailed as a way to eliminate transcription costs. The marketing hype claims that it is 95% accurate (which means if you are using speech recognition for your dictation, you must identify and manually correct one out of every 20 words). Correcting typos and adding formatting is more labor intensive than accurately entering text correctly in the first place.

While speech recognition enthusiasts think they are improving the situation by taking the human factor out of the dictation/transcription process, often they are only making matters worse. It's true that some people can keep their minds focused on doing one thing at a time (which helps when you’re using speech recognition). But in the real world, many are trying to do three things at the same time while fielding interruptions from other office staff members - or children. Concentration is at a premium -- as evidenced by these verbatim quotes from experienced professionals:

“Impression colon common migraine headache plan colon patient to common migraine headache patient to plan colon patient to try Midrin and Fioricet on a p.r.n. basis.”

“Past history the usual up to the usual.”

“The patient is a 35 year old right handed woman who lives with a partner who has been pregnant on two occasions and who has had two abortions and who did take birth control pills which she discontinued about 10 years ago because of profuse bleeding.”

Misplaced modifiers, dangling participles, blazing contradictions and run-on sentences! These are the stock in trade of most people who weren't English majors. Add in foreign accents, specialized vocabulary and you encounter problems that speech recognition cannot solve.

Very seldom do humans speak with complete clarity, correct grammar and indisputable accuracy. Speech recognition cannot compensate for all those variables 100% of the time. A professional transcriptionist with excellent language skills can provide you with well-tailored documents that can enhance your professionalism.

Speech recognition cannot do that.  The software does absolutely nothing to improve the language skills of the person using it.