Crescendo launches dedicated, back-end speech recognition solution for UK law firms

London, UK, 18 January 2005: Crescendo Systems Limited announces the introduction of the back-end speech recognition solution Crescendo Speech Processing to the UK legal market. Powered by SpeechMagic^TM from Philips Speech Recognition Systems, Crescendo Speech Processing incorporates a specialised recognition vocabulary for general law and property law, ensuring an optimal recognition rate and helping law firms increase the productivity of their secretarial staff through the shift from typing to editing. As a result, report creation is significantly speeded up; eliminating backlogs and reducing documentation costs.

Visitors to the Legal IT exhibition (London, 9-10 February 2005) are invited to experience Crescendo Speech Processing live at Stand 33.

Highlights and Features:

• Integration: Open platform that can be fully integrated with existing case management software. As a result, dictation takes place directly in the client's file, with the corresponding data being added automatically to each dictation.
• Back-end speech recognition: Full support of the two-tiered workflow where the Author dictates and the Secretary corrects and finalizes the report.
• Network capability: The system supports client-server architecture, enabling access to dictation and speech recognition functions from all network stations or over the Internet.
• Recognition accuracy: Loaded with UK-specific acoustic data as well as specialised vocabulary for general law or property law; Crescendo Speech Processing ensures optimal recognition accuracy from the very first use.
• Adaptation: Crescendo Speech Processing adapts to individual voice characteristics and improves through repeated use, thus enabling the Author to speak in their natural dialect and at their natural speed.
• Flexibility: The Supervisor is able to select which users, departments or work types should be handled by the recognition engine, and which should be transcribed in the traditional way.
• Mobility: Fee Earners who often dictate from various locations and who are already equipped with the DigiScribe-XL mobile digital dictation system will fully benefit from the speech recognition features as all dictations are securely transferred to the central system in real-time for recognition and editing.

"Crescendo Speech Processing is a significant productivity booster for secretarial transcription. Fee Earners will continue dictating the way they are used to, but the secretary will receive an automatically generated transcription of the dictation in addition to the sound file", explains Costa Mandilaras, President, Crescendo Systems Corporation . "This approach ensures that Fee Earners are not burdened with additional work, while significant efficiency gains are achieved on the transcription side of the dictation workflow."

Crescendo Speech Processing will be available through the Crescendo UK office in Sunbury-On-Thames, from April 2005.

For further information please contact:

Crescendo Systems Corporation Head Office, Laval, Canada
Claire Betis
Toll free: 1-800-724-2930