*SPAM*[Asterisk-Dev] $1500 Bounty for Dictation Module

[Steven Critchfield]

On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 08:36 -0500, Ray Burkholder wrote:
> 
> Quoting "Jerris, Michael MI" <mjerris at ofllc.com>:
> 
> > Can you expand upon what the requirements for this would be?  Are you
> > looking for a program that uses an asterisk chanel (zap, sip, IAX,
> > whatever) as the end point for recording and playback and then some sort
> > of interface (gui, command line, ??) to control payback?
> 
> It will probably be gpl license and included in the asterisk distribution.  I'll
> have to confirm with the customer.
> 
> Customer is planning on using IP phones so SIP at minimum, everything else at
> best.  

I think this would be something I would encourage my competitors to do
since they will quickly get thrown out of business in the US if they try
and use it for anything medical related that isn't handled inside a LAN.

And if you deploy in all the locations to make it safe, that becomes a
major headache for administration over time.

Clients of ours routinely get chastised over using cell phones for the
insecurities and quality issues involved. 

Quality of a recorded conversation can not be fixed after the fact. VoIP
may be fine most of the time, but when it introduces a lag or drops a
few packets, a human has to deal with it. Rarely would you expect to
have to proof listen to your own recorded message for technology
failures in a deployed product. I can tell you from the logs on our
medical dictation system that it is the norm for a doctor to dictate
straight through a job and not rewind or start recording again. So if
you lose sections of the recording due to packet lose, you have a broken
recording. If the network becomes congested and the audio becomes
choppy, your transcriptionist will have a nightmare time trying to be
productive.

>From the several years I have been closely tied to medical
transcription, I have learned that cost cutting in the audio capture can
not come at the cost of audio quality. We deployed some cheap handhelds
once that after time would become noisy. At that point it was cheaper
long term to replace a $200 handheld recorder than to hurt the
productivity of the transcriptionist or risk sending back documents that
had blanks or errors due to not being able to hear that section of the
recording.

If your client is even remotely wise, they should avoid VoIP as too big
of a liability. But this is my opinion.   


-- 
Steven Critchfield <critch at basesys.com>